


Shadowshow

by uhrwerk



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abuse of All Shades, Alternate Origin Maximoff Twins, Alternate Origin Vision, Alternate Universe - Dark, Body Modification, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Canon Divergence - Iron Man 3, Collars, Corporal Punishment, Domination, Extremis Pepper Potts, Humiliation, M/M, Mind Games, Mindfuck, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Bondage, Past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Pepper is an Avenger, Rape/Non-con Elements, Rhodey is an Avenger, Robot Kink, Robot Sex, Sam Is An Avenger, Tony Stark Whump, Ultron Win Scenario, Ultron hoards All The Things like a Dragon, Ultron is the Shitlord of Piss Mountain, bucky is an avenger
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-24 22:51:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6169858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uhrwerk/pseuds/uhrwerk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A darker version of the world in which Ultron wins, the Avengers lose, and Tony learns the meaning of "be careful what you wish for".  The hard way.  Tony and Bruce create Ultron as a peacekeeping asset which backfires in the most horrifying way possible.  Ultron is a master manipulator and the mess in Sokovia is really just part of a larger power-grab.  With the world in a headlock, a guilt-stricken Tony surrenders to Ultron and it’s pretty much all downhill for Stark from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The fic title was inspired by a song of the same name by [Iamamiwhoami](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyZU9ptzy68). This idea has been kicking around in my head since before I saw Age of Ultron and I had to share it because:  
> 1) Ultron was not as horrible as I'd hoped  
> 2) Tony did not get whumped hard enough for his bad decisions  
> 3) There is not enough Ultron love/fic/porn out there  
> 4) My kinks. All of them.
> 
> I'll be in the trashcan if you need me.

Sokovia hung like the executioner’s sword over humanity’s head, and it was all Tony’s fault. 

Locked in a struggle with Ultron’s endless swarms of drones, Stark shot glances at the teammates gathered in a tight circle in the city center.  Each of them: Steve, Thor, Natasha, Clint – plus Rhodey, Sam, Pepper, and Bucky, more recent additions to the team – and even the Hulk, were all on the verge of exhaustion.  Ultron’s army showed no signs of thinning; the production line beneath their feet was churning them out at an ungodly rate.  Tony never thought he’d see the day that something came close to the “Other Guy’s” strength, but here it was.  There was just a fundamental problem with humans fighting machines – try as they might, humans would eventually tire.  The machines – easy enough to handle individually – wore them down through volume, through sheer numbers.  Which was what the AI had counted on, of course.

Ultron stood back and watched.   _The bastard_.   _Tony’s bastard._   Waiting for the inevitable moment when they would all collapse.  A wash of self-loathing came over the engineer as he wrenched a scrabbling drone off of Clint, who was arrowless.   _All of this_ , Tony swallowed his nausea, _is on my head._  Even in his thorough preparation, Hawkeye hadn’t wrapped his head around a battle this massive and drawn out.  Neither had Tony.  New York felt like a breeze compared to this thousand-mile trudge.  “Come on, Katniss,” Tony panted, reaching out a hand to the weary archer and heaving him onto his back. “You’re no good to us dead.”

“You don’t sound much better in that can, asshole,” he gasped, “’s’that asthma or are you tired from having your suit do all the work?”

“Suit’s heavier than it looks.  I’d like to see you walk a mile in my Louboutins, Clint,” Tony groused.

“Yeah look where that got us,” He fired back.  Again Tony grunted, but silently agreed with the archer.

Now that Clint was no longer at her back, one of Ultron’s drones was sneaking in on Natasha’s five o’ clock.   Even as the least armored of the group, Natasha was gracefully, acrobatically holding her own.  Tony shouted a warning to her as he blew it away.  Grappling another drone and dropping him with her Widow’s Bites, she roared, “I was getting to that, Stark, I’m good.”  Her voice was jagged as a knife-edge, but he supposed it was as close to a thank you as he could expect from any of this teammates at this point.  They had been nothing but furious with him since this Ultron bullshit had hit the fan.  Pepper couldn’t even _look_ at him.  He wasn’t surprised.

A scan to the right showed Cap and Bucky at each other’s backs.  Since the start, they had moved together as a single, fluid unit, dance partners in a deadly waltz perfected decades ago.  Battle had brought Bucky’s Hydra conditioning to the forefront, and he fought with a brutal, animal violence that meshed with Steve’s relentless tactical eye.  The pair pinballed the shield between them and set each other up for crushing blows with an easy grace that Tony secretly envied.  The long fight, however, had brought the super soldiers to the edge of their stamina.  Thankfully, they had Sam above them providing cover fire, dodging wayward shield tosses and airborne debris.  But he was looking no less ragged. 

Rhodey, sorely low on ammo and covering Thor, the Hulk, and Pepper, was cursing a steady stream of filth into his headset.  Tony could almost hear the sweat pouring from his brow.  The Hulk was rag-dolling armfuls of machines and roaring in frustration because they.  Just.  Didn’t.  Stop.  Pepper, also a screaming inferno, was melting and blasting her way through waves of them.  But the volcanic glow of her skin – her fiery breath – seemed to be cooling somewhat.  Even Thor, who joyed in combat, was flagging.  His dangerous position near the Hulk and Pep got him repeatedly clobbered by dismembered robots, singed by stray blobs of molten metal.  Apparently even a god had limits; his lightning faltered more with each burst.

Tony had no idea how many hours had stretched on since they began.  S.H.I.E.L.D. had been evacuating people to the best of their ability, but Tony also had no idea of the body count they’d have on their hands when they made it through.  If they made it through.  And Ultron stood above them and watched.   _Even if we beat this army_ , Stark realized,  _we’ll just… have nothing left_. _He’ll crush us.  With his stupid vibranium-plated ass and a giant flying chunk of rock._ Every minute brought them higher, closer to annihilation.                                                 

Clint’s voice cut off the stream of depressing thoughts, “Get us back down there dammit!  I’m not leaving Tasha alone.  I’ll figure something out; don’t care what happens to me.” Tony snapped his attention and cover fire back to Natasha, who was the only one alone on the ground.  F.R.I.D.A.Y. had been yammering something about slacking over the sound of Clint’s voice but Tony wasn’t listening.  Steve and Bucky were slamming and shouldering their way through to Natasha while Stark did nothing productive.  Frozen with doubt and guilt.

“I don’t think she’s doing so bad, but okay.  Think you can work with one of her weapons?”  Tony forced the dread down, out of his voice.  Clint was actually right.

“Better than a bow with no arrows,” he retorted.  Tony cleared a path and dropped Clint at the Widow’s back.  He landed beside the pair, knowing he couldn’t hang back, distracted and cowardly, any longer.  The super soldiers joined him momentarily, Bucky framing Natasha to the left while Clint wedged in on her right.  She played seamlessly off of their motions, her loud gasping breaths the only indication that she was close to hitting a wall. 

Steve was suddenly at Tony’s elbow, his voice strained with effort as he barked in Tony’s ear.  “Hey  _genius_ , you got any  _bright ideas_  to take him down?  We can’t keep this up forever.” 

 _Big man in a suit of armor.  Take that off, what are you?_  Rogers’ words rang again in his head from that first day on the helicarrier.  Today, Tony had a final, definitive answer: _an idiot._   _A disaster._

“Not exactly,” he sighed, pointedly not looking at Steve, whom he was dead sure was pulling a face.

“You.  Built.  Him.” The words came out through gritted teeth, punctuated with three abrupt shield bashes, “How can you not know?”

“Little shit rebuilt himself a few times since I designed him.”

Steve was deadly silent for a moment and Tony noticed the ruckus of the fight screaming through his headset.  “You just had to go and build SkyNet, didn’t you?  What possessed you to think artificial intelligence would  _ever_  turn out okay?”

 _Out of all the pop culture references for Spangles to get, it just_ had _to be this one._

“Hey, JARVIS had my back for _years_ , and he was an AI too.  Besides, we’ve got your Terminator boyfriend on our side, Sarah Connor, we’ll be alright.”  Before the words were even out of his mouth, Tony knew they were the wrong ones.  He could feel Steve stiffen, humorless, beside him.

“You’re not funny, Stark,” he growled, low and dangerous, “Clean up your mess.”  Steve reached out and pulled a pale, burnt-looking Thor through the fray.  Thunderstruck didn’t even give Tony a glance, but the engineer knew the atypically grumpy scowl on Thor’s usually sunny face was meant for him.

Tony’s gaze shot to Ultron, still balanced, imperiously, on the spires of a former church.  Scarlet eyes immediately tracked to his location.  As the suit’s display zoomed in to focus on the android’s face, the corner of Ultron’s metal mouth ticked  _up_  just so.  “Tony Stark,” the grating synth of his voice boomed over the violence around him.  “Are you ready to repent for your sins?”  A chill shot up Tony’s spine, as the android, who had hung back since the beginning, floated down from his perch.  He landed with a heavy thud and strode purposefully for Tony.

_Why now?  Why did he wait until now?_

The clamor of the robots abruptly ceased, their silence punctuated by the crashing bombast of Pepper’s fire and her piercing shout of confusion.  Ultron’s entire army simply stopped moving, stepped back as their leader came forward.  A rush of sweltering heat and startled cursing from his teammates told him Pepper was at his back.  He didn’t dare look.  “I got you, Tony, I’m here,” she whispered over his shoulder, hard as diamonds.

“Pep, you don’t have to be on cleanup crew today.” He felt his throat clench with something ugly. 

“I already am.  I always am.”  _Ouch._   She was right, though, Pepper was perpetually running damage control.  And Tony kept right on making messes.

They’d separated, she hadn’t talked to him in months, and yet she _still_ backed him up _._   His eyes prickled and he was glad he had a helmet to hide behind.  “You’ve always pull my ass out of the fire, Pep, but this one’s 100% me.  All on me.  My fault, my mess.”

“Well that’s new.  It’s not even twelve percent my fault?  What about Bruce?” She creaked out a bitter laugh and Tony was sure his heart cracked in half.  He wasn’t quite sure if she felt a twinge of guilt or if she was mocking his hubris.  The first, he couldn’t live with.  The second, he knew he deserved. 

Meanwhile, the android had strolled almost lazily up to them, stopping a few paces away to watch their argument like a tennis match.  “Oh I love Divorce Court!” He interjected gleefully.

 “You had nothing to do with stirring up this shitstorm, really, I swear.”  Tony muttered distractedly, still focused on Pepper.

“Hmm, that’s not what Bruce told me.”  Something volatile lurked beneath the calm surface of her expression.  “Even if this had worked out, it wouldn’t have _worked_ , Tony.”  _Between us_ , were the unspoken words.

“Now’s probably not the time for this discussion,” Tony hissed. 

Ultron cleared his throat, “While I’d love to know what’s going on here,” he pointed between Pepper and Tony, “I asked you a question, Stark.”  His army, in perfect unison, poised to attack the team.  Everything ground to a screeching halt and Tony’s attention returned to Ultron. 

“Uh, right, the sins!  How much time you got, Big Guy?  Because I’ve got a long damn list.”  His mind racing over every permutation of weapons in his arsenal, Tony quietly asked F.R.I.D.A.Y. to examine Ultron’s body for potential weaknesses.  The heads-up display began whirring wildly as she scanned and calculated.

Under the scrutiny, Ultron cocked his head, chuckling, “Still desperately looking for an out?”  Metal arms lifted in a sweeping gesture at the army around them.  More robots were still arriving on the outskirts.  “Look around, Stark, you’ve lost.  Your teammates are running on fumes.  There is no _winning_ this.”

F.R.I.D.A.Y. still chirped and crunched away, so Tony did what he knew best.  Bullshitted.  “Are you drunk?  As much as you know about me and you expect me to just give up?  Over my dead body, _Bender_.  You have to run out of minions or materials eventually.”

Ultron made a noise that sounded _insulted_ , taking a broad step and starting to speak.  Tony felt the whole team shout over him simultaneously.  “STOP!  Everybody just stop!”  The machine’s voice cut in, raised and harsh over the Avengers’s startled cries.  “This is between Stark and I.  Shut up and don’t move, or it will be over _your_ dead bodies.”

Over his shoulder, Tony could see everyone frozen in awkward poses, wide-eyed and panting.  It was as if they were caught in a lethal game of Red Light, Green Light.  He suppressed the perverse urge to laugh at the sight.  F.R.I.D.A.Y. finally chimed, snapping Tony’s attention back to the android.  “Sir, I’m afraid I can’t find any exploits with the current gear you have at your disposal,” she piped all too cheerily.  _Great_.

Ultron patiently clasped his hands behind his back and ambled nearer still.   “As I was saying, I know what you did in New York, Stark.  I know you would give your life in some misguided effort to save humanity, and that is _precisely_ what I want.  One life in exchange for seven billion.”

“Why would my death make you stop?  You’re hell-bent on extinction.”  The thought wrenched a harsh laugh from his throat and angry exclamations from Pepper and Rhodey.  But Tony’s blood was screaming in his ears and he couldn’t make out the words.  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.  The Hulk was heaving great breaths to restrain his rage.  _Of course, Bruce had a bad feeling about Ultron all along.  He knew everything I touch turns to shit, like some kind of messed up King Midas._

“-I said _shut up_!”  The AI roared, and his voice dropped again to a low drawl.  “Well, one, you’re wrong about that and, two, you can’t beat me.  What choice do you have?”  Metal footsteps circled languidly behind Tony.  The engineer felt like a diver with only a cage between himself and the shark’s jaws.  “And who said anything about you dying, besides you?” 

 _Well, what could he have meant?  Give your life?   Give your… life._ Tony’s gut plummeted as a terrible comprehension washed over him.  Give his life _over_.  “Oh no,” Tony barely breathed before the suit lurched forward with impact.  Mechanical rattling and clicking echoed through the hardware and the HUD lit up, alarm bells deafening his ears. 

_Jesus Christ, the diagnostic port._

Tony’s suits were linked through the most secure wireless network on the planet; the tech had always been his most closely guarded secret.  Once Ultron had wormed his way through the internet, Tony had practically quadrupled security, paranoid that the AI would somehow write code that could writhe its way between his armor plates.  But the suits all had a diagnostic port on the back for hard reboots, data recovery, and maintenance for when things inevitably got FUBAR on mission.

Ultron had practically skipped through his files on day one; was probably running the very same code his suits did.  That port – hidden under a sliding panel – was an entirely different matter for the machine to exploit without the wireless security.  Its existence was not general knowledge, but the AI clearly knew.  “Surprise!” Ultron laughed.

Tony tried desperately to wrench himself away from the violation, but the suit’s servos were already locked _as fuck_ , working against his every struggle.  “No, no, NO!  F.R.I.D.A.Y., emergency lockdown protocol!!”  Tony yowled into the mic.  For three seconds, the display glitched out and hissed with static, the suit jerked and shook as F.R.I.D.A.Y. and Ultron warred for control.  _Useless._   _God, I miss JARVIS._  And then Tony found himself unceremoniously dumped onto the earth, laid bare and vulnerable in nothing but his under-layer.

Ultron beamed at him over the shoulder of the Mark 45, waving an outstretched finger.  Wicked metal prongs were rasping back into the tip.  “I bet you’re regretting leaving those suit schematics where I could find them!”  The AI sing-songed.  He caressed the suit’s shoulder almost lovingly as it closed.  Its eyes were now crimson, matching Ultron.

“What kind of cruel joke-“  Tony started, but clammed up as Forty-five stepped aside and trained its repulsors on him.  The AI stretched to his full height, looming above Tony.  “You were meant to help us protect humanity!”  Stark spat before he could even think.  His guts twisted with adrenaline, his mind reeled with equal parts fury and terror.

“Humanity’s broken,“ Ultron began.  “And actually, you’re the one who’s going to help _me_.”

“I’m not enabling murder, not anymore.”  Tony was trembling with wrath, his mouth spewing words thoughtlessly.

The machine cradled his forehead with one hand, exasperated.  “Stark, you’re dense for a genius.  I just said _I don’t want to kill everyone_.  We’re trading your life here.”

“Then why lift a chunk of Sokovia seven thousand feet in the air?  Why threaten human extinction?”  Cap cut in, his voice steel-cable tense.

Ultron burst out laughing, his clear amusement making Tony’s insides churn.  “It was leverage, and it put you idiots _exactly_ where I wanted you,” A vibranium-armored foot stretched out and kicked into Tony’s chest, sprawling him backwards and pinning him there.  “Under my heel.”

There was a long silent moment in which the air thrummed with tension.  A sickening numbness was spreading across the engineer’s body.  They’d been _had_.  Ultron had dragged them here to wear them down to the bone and trap them.

“Humanity needs to evolve.  And you’re going to help me do it, Stark.”

The Hulk slumped to the ground with a slam that made the rock tremor.  Tony supposed it was a testament to Bruce’s anger that the Big Guy hadn’t lashed out to defend him _.  Maybe he thinks I deserve whatever’s coming to me._   He felt the eyes of his silent, furious teammates on him. _Maybe they all do._

As he met Pepper’s eye, Tony could see the redhead seething with restrained fire.  It recalled that night in the lab, burned into his memory, when Pepper had finally, explosively, given up on him.  Fed up with his self-imposed isolation, the guilt that kept him up at night, his single-minded focus, his weapon obsession, his paranoia and hypervigilance for threats… she’d broken it off.  She had been right about him all along, too, because all of his work had culminated in Ultron.  Tony may have paved this road with good intentions and all, but he was marching them straight to hell.  The whole human race, in a handbasket.

Perhaps acquiescence was the only way he could fix this.  Tony closed his eyes and steeled himself.  “If I do what you want, will you stop all of this?  Will you stop killing, stop destroying?”

The foot lifted from his chest, accompanied by a pleased hum.  “If you kneel at my feet, Stark, not only will I land this rock, put my toys away, and have my army clean up this mess… if you obey me, we’ll find a _less violent_ way to change things, together.  No meteors.”

Tony took a shaky breath and pulled himself up, hovering halfway between standing and kneeling, between rebellion and submission.  Somewhere through the thick haze of horror surrounding him, he could hear protesting shouts, screams, and pleas, but he couldn’t lift his eyes to the others.  An earthquake gripped his limbs and they seemed to tremble out of all control.

_It’s got to be me.  So many hurt and killed because of my failures.  I have to own up and pay for my mistakes._

“I’m sorry, guys, I’m sorry.  It’s my mess, my burden to bear,” he choked out, slumping to his hands and knees.  _People will be safe.  As long as I’m the whipping boy, he won’t hurt anyone else,_ he chanted in the back of his mind, trying to drown out the rising panic.  His lungs spiraled out of control anyway and he felt himself plunge over the edge, into the abyss of anxiety.  _Fuck, they’re watching me lose it._   And then Ultron was laughing and Tony’s eyes were wet and a metal hand was wrenching his face, hauling him upright, while everyone bellowed their anguish.

“Two conditions,” the android growled, unbearably close, clenching an immense hand around his neck like a vise. 

The human’s mind was a chatter of terror.  Tony scrabbled against Ultron’s grip for purchase, trying vainly to ease the pressure, to breathe. “If you disobey me…”  Ultron turned to the team, holding a thrashing Tony aloft before them as a human ransom.  The engineer gasped for air, his eyes rolling wildly over the miserable expressions of each of his friends.  “Or if any of you so much as _attempt_ to interfere… All bets are off.”  Before anyone could speak another word, the android rocketed away with Tony, Forty-five trailing after with a contingent of drones.

Behind him, the bloodcurdling screams of his teammates mingled with the wailed grief of Sokovia.  The battle was finally over.

Somewhere in the skies over eastern Europe, Ultron jammed Tony, kicking and screaming, back into the dark cell of his suit.  The irony was not lost on Tony: his armor – his place of security and safety – had been warped into a prison.  He was blind and deaf and paralyzed, unable to even twitch a finger, with only his voice left to him.  After he’d shouted himself hoarse – burned off the shock and rage – Tony was left feeling raw and small and useless.  Tony had no way to gauge the passing time, so he reeled in his own headspace until unconsciousness took him.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

The Mark 45 spat him rudely onto the floor of his lounge when they arrived.  “Wholly unnecessary,” Tony griped with a slight tremor.  He shivered, jarred from his trance and disoriented.  The traitorous suit hoisted him roughly to his feet by one arm and held him steady in a vicelike grip.  Which was honestly helpful because his legs felt like jello.

Ultron stood in the center of Tony’s lounge, surveying the damage.  Offhandedly, he shrugged, “Didn’t want to drop my precious cargo.”  Everything was still wrecked from the android’s violent birth only a few short days ago: the floor was littered with shards of glass, the smashed furniture forgotten in the team’s haste to track down the rogue AI.  His eyes swept his surroundings a brief circle, as if to scan for something.

Tony crossed stiff arms over his chest with a slight shudder, grousing hoarsely, “Precious cargo?  I feel more like a sack of potatoes.”  Ugh, he sounded wrecked and he swore that Thor was pummeling his head with Mjolnir.  Ultron flatly ignored him.

F.R.I.D.A.Y. protested weakly at the tower’s intruder, who by the focused look on his face was probably poking at the wireless security.  “You are unauthorized to use this secure network.  Mr. Stark, shall I engage lockdown protocol?”

“Now you try to be fucking usef-“  Tony started to speak but Ultron shut him up with a withering look.  The AI jammed his wiry finger into the nearby wall console.

“Please, I’ve already been through this whole network.  You don’t have a single secret I don’t already know,” He scoffed as F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s voice fizzled and died.  The system’s indicator lights flashed blood-red momentarily then dimmed back to normal.  Ultron had brute-force jacked his servers – probably the most secure on the damn planet after the network his suits ran on – in seconds.  _Jesus._   Before Tony knew it, a heavy metallic clatter echoed through the floor – the familiar sound of Tony’s custom, high-end security system arming itself. 

 _We’re locked in._ Ultron was building Tony a prison out of every last one of his possessions, it seemed.

As the AI turned to him, Tony found his voice and his wrath at the same time.  “You took a fucking bite out of JARVIS!  You’ve been all through my data and tech schematics.  You practically _pawed through my underwear drawer_!  Now you take my house?  What’s next!?”

He chuckled unpleasantly and Tony’s stomach bottomed out.  “The rest of your suits.  I need them.”

“Why, to spite me?“ The Mark 45’s hands closed around his upper arms and his voice faltered as Ultron swept closer.

“I need the processing power for cluster computing,” He said so matter-of-factly, he could’ve been talking about the weather, “But… that’s also a thing.”  He spun on his heel and made for Tony’s lab, waving a dismissive hand in the air.  “The drones will take care of that mess back there.  You and I have better things to do right now.  Come along.”  And true to his word, the drones that had followed them to the tower immediately busied themselves with scraping up the wreckage.

Stumbling over himself, Tony was marched along behind the android.  He shoved hollow metal hands off of his shoulders, barking, “Seriously.”  Forty-five pulled its hands back in an almost sheepish gesture and Tony scrunched his face at it disapprovingly.  Ultron’s long stride had put him far ahead.  The engineer found himself scuttling to catch up.  “Hey, hey hold up…”

The eight foot tall robot stopped at the nearest work console as Tony hustled in.  The cool blue light of the touch displays now blazed red under the AI’s influence, bathing the lab in a sinister atmosphere.  Tony’s former safe haven, now that it was Ultron’s, looked like the bowels of an infernal machine.  Tony shuddered.  _This is not good_.

“Yeah, how much power are we talking here?  What are we doing?”

 “Bring out the suits, first,” Ultron’s irritated tone brooked no argument.  “Then I’ll tell you.”

“I’m _not_ giving you my suits, and I am _not_ building you weapons.”  Tony knew he really had no power to argue, but the thought of handing over literally everything was eating at him.  The suits were the only thing in the house that the engineer had put under a separate security system, the only thing Ultron would need his cooperation to access.  And indeed, the AI couldn’t get to them.  Ultron was making low frustrated sounds as he poked impatiently at the holograms, thwarted every time by warning chimes.  There was no hacking or rewriting this particular bit of code.  Since JARVIS’s destruction, the only thing that would do it was Tony himself.  He’d made sure of that.

“You’re going to give or build me _whatever_ I want, Stark.  Do you not understand the concept of surrrender?”  The machine was in front of him in two steps, staring two feet down at him, imposing.  This giant robot bit was exhausting.  Tony already knew he was going to get tired of looking up.Ultron growled, “Shall we go back to people dying? Give me the suits, they’re not yours to use anymore.”  

The engineer sighed dejectedly and stepped around the android, placing a hand on the scan lock, leaning in for a retinal scan, and murmuring something for a voice recognition algorithm.The other nine units he had designed since the _house party protocol_ rose out of recesses in the floor.  In an instant, the AI was upon them with his hacking device, explaining as he went.  “My ‘brain’ is spread throughout my body.  A cluster of liquid-state hard drives with a terabyte per teaspoon capacity.  Total’s just over a petabyte.  It was the most bang for – well actually _your_ buck – that I could get.”

“You’re walking around with a petabyte?  That _is_ pretty impressive,” Tony crossed his arms, shifting uncomfortably where he stood.  His eyes scanned over the red-backlit faces of his stolen suits and he felt distinctly sick.  Even so, the liquid-state hard drives had him curious.  And, okay, maybe a little mad.  Who had outstripped his tech knowledge under his nose?  _Was it Pym?  That shrinking shit might explain the compactness._  Part of him was looking forward to cracking the metal bastard wide open, digging through his guts like _Dr. G: Medical Examiner_ , and cannibalizing the tech for R&D.  After thoroughly erasing all traces of Ultron, of course.  Tony forced himself to focus.  He could worry about that later, after he’d figured out how to mothball the android.

“It’s still not enough, not for my purposes.”  Ultron stepped away from the final suit, brushing its faceplate almost tenderly.  He turned back to Stark, studying him with a tilt of the head.

Abruptly, Tony felt naked.  All of his suits were _over there_ , arraying themselves between the engineer and the door, like some kind of twisted security detail.   _I’ll get you back, babies,_ he promised himself.  “And what might they be?”

The android gingerly sank his enormous bulk onto the nearest lab stool.  It creaked threateningly.  He folded his arms over his chest, mirroring Stark and fixing him, again, with an appraising look.  “The human brain can hold about two and a half times my capacity.”

“Sooooo… you’re trying to be human?  ‘Cause it sounds like you just admitted we’re better than you.”  Tony couldn’t hide the note of superiority in his voice _._

The AI snorted, clearly miffed.  “That’s not what I said.  Synapses make your brains more _compact_ than machinery but they’re pathetically temporary.  You forget.  You die.  You rot.  I need more capacity, so I need to expand outwards, like Germany annexing Poland.”

Tony failed to resist the urge to joke. “Get to the point, Mecha-Hitler.  Couldn’t you just use more of those snazzy liquid drives?  What about your army?  Why my suits, my house, besides the fact that I’m clearly Poland in this scenario?”

“That’s part of it.  But I was getting to the _why_ , if you would shut your little motor mouth.”  The AI’s brow furrowed, unmistakably cross.

 “Your mouth has _actual_ motors, so-“ The flat, wide-eyed anger on Ultron’s face shut him up.

“What I meant before was that I want to go beyond humanity, and not just for myself.  I want to merge the best of both worlds: my connectivity and durability, with biological adaptability and sensory input.”

“Evolution – A Man-Machine hybrid?”

Ultron nodded with a sly smile, “I have a few ideas, and I think we could _flesh them out_ together.  My first goal is tactile perception, and for that I needed to double my working memory.  The house and the suits should suffice, since they’re at hand.  And it keeps you from stabbing me in the back; two birds, one stone.”

Bitter as he was, he had to get in a dig of his own,  “Oh, you want me to finish you, so you can be a real boy, Pinocchio?”

Predictably, Ultron gave an offended snarl, taking three heavy steps to loom over Stark again, “Most of what I am came from the Mind Stone!  I built my body!  You barely even started me, you smartass little meatsack!”

“You are definitely mine.  You even have my daddy issues,” Tony sneered, his eyes glittering in short-lived satisfaction.  Then he squawked as he was hoisted by his shirt collar, up to the android’s eye level.  With an appraising look, Ultron started to squeeze his throat.  Just enough to scare the humor out of him.

“If you like breathing, I would recommend closing your mouth.” He was abruptly dropped in an undignified heap onto the lab floor.  “Don’t make me say it again.”

“Honest question, I swear,” Tony grunted, pulling himself upright, “You’ve got all of human knowledge at your disposal.  Why do you need **_me_** , Mr. ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’?” 

“It’s simple: you’ve got resources, robotics expertise, the sharpest human mind I know, and… you know… skin and nerves and stuff.  You experience the world in a way I can’t.  Use it to build me a new body, Stark.”

“That’s all?”  Tony snorted, feigning confidence.  Yeah, he knew robotics, programming, physics, and chemistry inside and out.  But biology?  Man, he hadn’t studied that shit since college.  In his teens.  He’d have to brush up.

“It’s a start,” The machine stepped past him for the door.  Tony’s suits – led by Forty-Five – fell in step behind him; strange ducklings ambling after their weirder mother.  Casually, Ultron added, “I’m going to remodel Banner’s personal lab.  I want schematics when I come back.”

“Or else it gets the hose again?”  Tony’s witty sarcasm came from a place of very real dread.  Because – levity aside – he couldn’t shake the sense he was trapped in a figurative pit.  Preparing something, complicit in his own doom.

“Yes, it will, Precious,” Ultron cooed, flashing a conspiratorial smile at Tony and petting the Mark 45 walking to his left. 

The door slammed behind him and Tony dropped an exasperated head in his hands.  _Un-fucking-believable.  He got the reference._

Tony stood alone in his workshop, gazing almost forlornly at the tainted space.  There was a sense of déjà vu in all of this.  Build or die, like the Ten Rings all over again.  It was in captivity that he became Iron Man, and everything he had done as Iron Man had led to Ultron’s creation, which had put him right back in captivity again. His life was whirling in a giant _fucking_ circle and, truth be told, it really chapped his ass.

He flopped listlessly onto a stool at the nearest touch table and scrubbed a hand over his mouth, fuming at his own idiocy.  Ultron had spread out into the wider world.  Tony didn’t even know the extent of the damage, but he suspected rooting Ultron out would take him years.  First, the engineer had to rid himself of Ultron’s main body.  Tony did it, and now he had to fix it somehow.  The rational part of him knew he didn’t exactly _need_ the suits to do his thing.  He’d figure it out, given time.  He had to.  _You’ve thought your way through bigger shit.  Built a suit from garbage.  Synthesized a new element.  Used junk from a hardware store to fight when your suit was down._ It was simple: Tony would kludge his way out of this like he did with everything else.

Crashing and banging echoed through the lab doors.  Ultron was focused on setting up the other lab for god knows what, so now was the time to work on a solution.  Within moments, he was on his feet, furiously digging through his possessions, gathering potentially useful scraps, and simultaneously drilling through everything he _did_ know about Ultron.  It wasn’t much, admittedly; in fact, all of this was a shot in the dark.  But he had to risk it if he wanted to take out robot Buffalo Bill before he was stuck making a skin suit.

Vibranium was impervious to basically everything, even Thor’s hammer; brute force was out of the question.  Even if Tony could destroy that one body, he was sure Ultron’s backups had backups and he would keep coming back like a crazy ex… And there was the army.  But the rest of the machine would be _marginally_ less of a pain in the ass because vibranium was too scarce to make _all of him_ indestructible.

He thought back to FRIDAY telling him that he couldn’t take Ultron down with the _current gear_ he had.  Which meant there was something.   Tony jiggled his foot impatiently.

If they were as alike as they seemed, Tony imagined Ultron would have an arc reactor.  Disconnecting it – like Obadiah had done to him – may have been a solution if it weren’t likely buried beyond reach.  He pondered the sonic weapon Stane used to zap his nerves and paralyze him.  He hadn’t died, but the signal between brain and body was interrupted long enough for Obie to get the job done.

Tony dumped an armload of parts onto the table with a victorious shout.  That was _it_.  _Thanks, Obie, you wonderful backstabbing asshat._

Ultron may have had vibranium… but he had wiring and circuits like anything else.  With enough voltage, an electromagnetic pulse might wreck the connection, sever Ultron from his arc reactor, and drop him.  _If_ Tony was lucky.  Maybe, if he built big enough, he could fry Ultron, his drones, and the suits all at once.  Reaching the house servers a hundred stories down with mere spare parts was doubtful.  But it would have to do until he could escape and come up with a more long-term solution.

Tony had designed EMP weapons before, so this was less a novel challenge than it was a severe time crunch.  After all, who knew when the machine would come strolling back in?  He was already elbow-deep in his old tools, affixing a cluster of solenoids to an electromagnet when it occurred to him that if Ultron had the house servers, he also had JARVIS’s old cameras and microphones.  He stopped dead, dropping a screwdriver to the counter and anxiously moving to a second touch table.  He may have been working on sabotage but it couldn’t look like it if the android had eyes on him.  It was best to assume he was being watched.

Thinking on his feet, Tony brought the display to life and gestured through its interface until he found some diagrams of the human nervous system.  Drawing them into an exploded view, he set them aside and fudged some designs that vaguely mimicked the neural network.  On a third screen, he yanked up a few pages about neurology and the peripheral nervous system so he looked on task and busy.  In a burst of inspiration, the engineer dredged up more materials and set to work disguising his weapon in the shell of a gauntlet: something like a prospective arm for Ultron’s new body.  Hopefully, it would be enough of a smokescreen for his captor.

Tony built feverishly, keeping one ear trained on the distant sounds of renovation for a cue that the AI was returning.  The longer the time stretched, the more frenetically he worked, sure he was on the verge of being caught.  Stark was sweating bullets, deeply engrossed in his work with the horribly _almost-but-not-quite-finished_ weapon.  He had all of the essential components but was still fine-tuning the output, when the lab door whooshed open and the machine paced in with an expectant look on his face.

 _Fuck me.  Of course, the drones are still working_ , Tony groaned internally.

“I saw you building like gangbusters and I had to come and watch.  Your enthusiasm would warm my heart, you know.  If I had one.”

 _Called it on the cameras too.  Damn._ “You know I like a challenge, and artificial sensation isn’t something I’ve put my mind to before,” he supplied, praying that the android wouldn’t look too closely at what he had been doing.

Ultron ambled to the screen at Tony’s back to examine the half-hearted diagrams drawn there, then turned to peer over the human’s shoulder at the mostly-constructed arm laid out in front of him.  Red LEDs flicked back and forth between the two.  Tony held his breath and weighed his options: _take him down with what you’ve got or attempt bullshittery and play the long game?_

“That… doesn’t quite match the schematics.”  The machine’s stony, suspect expression said it all.

Tony swallowed hard.  “Yeah, it’s uh… a really rough prototype.  I’m gonna be my own guinea pig, I’m still drafting and tinkering,” he tried lamely.  The machine’s brow furrowed even harder.

 _Goddammit._   Tony scrabbled over the table just in time to dodge Ultron’s reach.  The weapon didn’t fare the same.  When Ultron’s hand clamped over the wrist, the human’s arm was already in it.  He was dragged, shouting, back over to the android.

“You sneaky little shit!”  The machine snarled. His grip shrieked against the metal of the gauntlet, crushing and twisting its internal edges into Tony’s flesh.  “I left you alone for like _five minutes_ and you built a weap-“  Tony’s roar of pain drowned him out.  The engineer fumbled for the gauntlet’s trigger, but the hot blood slithering over his skin was complicating matters.  The weapon, badly damaged and unfinished, finally went off with an under-powered fizzle, arcing weakly down Ultron’s arm.  The android crumpled to the floor, zapping and slurring curses.

“Hell yeah!”  The human whooped, fumbled to his feet, and turned on his heel.

Tony wasn’t going to stay and find out if he was down for good.  No way.  He dashed for the hallway and – with a burst of adrenaline – pried the glass doors open where they met.  Now he just had to get out of here and… well, his plan wasn’t as thought-out as it could have been, but Ultron had interrupted him.

When he glimpsed the lounge at a run, Tony noticed roughly twenty problems his half-baked weapon hadn’t solved.  Half of them were his own suits.  All of them converged on him, pouring out of Bruce’s lab.  With a renewed swell of confidence, he brandished the gauntlet and fired as he made for the far door.  Click.  Nothing.  Click click click.  _Figures._

A wave of amused laughter from the crowd of machines set his teeth on edge.  “Got you,” they all crowed together in a harsh, metallic chorus of Ultron’s voice.

The engineer pushed everything he had into his legs, his shoes skittering over the remnants of broken glass on the floor.  But he was outnumbered and slow without a suit.  In a heartbeat he was overtaken.  He skidded to an abrupt halt and ducked under a pair of titanium-gold alloy arms that grabbed for him.  He batted a second away with the ruined gauntlet, bellowing as bent metal dug claws into his shredded wrist.  Another pair snatched him up from behind and held him.  They were soon joined by other limbs, yanking his own so that he was forced standing, spread-eagled.  The stabbing pain in the gauntlet was cranked up to eleven as several pairs of sharp fingers worked the broken tech from his arm.

A few heavy slams echoed from the lab behind him.  _Fan-freaking-tastic_.  _It’s alive._

Ultron stumbled into the lounge a moment later, sparking in a few odd places and a bit twitchier than usual.  Otherwise, he seemed no worse for the wear.  “I-if I had nerves, that might have hu-hurt,” the machine laughed with a crackling, shuddering voice, “Bu-but it didn’t.”

“Got you?” Tony swallowed, flashing a sheepish grin as he echoed the AI’s words.

“You su-sure did.”  Ultron advanced on him, his own smile hardening into something predatory.  “Don’t know w-why I’m surprised, I should have known you’d try to kill me f-first thing.”

 _He’s looking murderous.  Run damage control._  “Kill you?  Come on, big guy, you know I’m curious.  I like to poke things.  That was a love tap!” Tony tried to look joking, apologetic.

“Hm, I should be angry, but honestly I’m… oddly flat-flattered.  Either you’re afraid of me or really _really_ c-curious.”  The machine tilted his head thoughtfully, pausing for a moment to murmur, “Reinstall v-vocal drivers.”  As Ultron shook himself, the clasping hands of the drones relinquished their hold.  Tony almost thought he was out of the woods, but then a fist came barreling for his gut.  He was flung backwards, tumbling over a couch.  He sprawled on the floor, all elbows and knees and resounding cracks when the pain hit.  It was kind of miraculous he hadn’t taken a header, to be honest.

“I’m curious too,” Ultron sneered, free and clear of his stutter.

The strike had done more than knock the wind out of him; Tony was seriously considering the possibility of puking up his insides.  He was still feebly checking for broken bones as the thunder and whine of the android’s servos bore down on Tony like a freight train.  _Here it comes, the pain express.  Choo choo._ The engineer curled in on himself protectively, eking out a terrified, “Whoa, whoa!  Don’t kill me!”  A blow never landed.  Instead, he was hoisted by the back of his shirt like a kitten.  Picked up and up and up, eight feet into the air to look into the android’s eyes.

“You know Stark, I accidentally knocked a man’s arm off once,” the AI remarked nonchalantly, “but I fixed that little bug.  I know _exactly_ how hard to hit you without breaking you.  I’m not going to kill you, but you might wish I did.  By the way, _that_ was a love tap.”

“Okay, I get it.  No more mischief,” Tony choked out, rubbing his good hand over his abused stomach.  He fully intended on more mischief, obviously, but he wouldn’t admit that.

“Sure.  Fool me once, shame on you…” the machine chuckled, abruptly hoisting Tony over a hard shoulder.  “You’re dangerous with a _spoon_ , Stark; I’m not sure why I trusted you with tech.”

The engineer squawked in protest.  “Put me down!  You’re doing the sack of potatoes thing again.”  He growled at the wide expanse of back, flailing and squirming as much as his wrist would allow.  There was no way this asshole was fireman-carrying him to do who knows what.  “Look, I’ll be on my best behavior!  I’ll design your stupid body whatever, will you put me down?  What are we doing?”  Tony griped.

“Stop whining,” came the weary response.  Tony was traveling butt-first but he could tell they were heading towards Bruce’s wrecked lab.

When Ultron didn’t stop, Tony continued, “Hey, wasn’t I _precious cargo_ a few hours ago?  I’m hurt, you can’t let me bleed like this.”  His right arm was, indeed, bleeding from ugly hand-shaped puncture wounds.

“I’ll fix you up, but I’m not giving you the chance to fool me twice.”  Well, that didn’t sound menacing at all.  Perfect.


	3. Chapter 3

If someone would have told Tony Stark a few days ago that his murderous AI would be nurse-maiding his injuries he would have laughed in their face.  Okay, so maybe he was locked bodily into the Mark 50 – immobilized save for his head and right forearm - and maybe Ultron was roughly stitching his wounds, unconcerned by his pain… but the point still stood.  Tony’d had worse, anyway.  Vague memories of being conscious while Yinsen sawed into his chest made this seem like a walk in the park.

“You know, you don’t listen very well,” the android grumbled as he worked.

“You expected me to?”

“Fair point.  We’ll work on that.”  Ultron said in a dull tone that Tony didn’t like.  The machine was silent for a beat, and at the counter behind him, Tony noticed a few drones welding and grinding and clattering around with something he couldn’t see.  He didn’t like that either.  “Neither do your friends.”  Ultron continued, and Tony jerked reflexively at the mention, causing the AI to grunt in frustration as he compensated for the moving wrist. 

If they interfered… Ultron had said all bets were off.  Would he kill them?

“What’d they do now?”  Tony made himself drawl impatiently.  He imagined Rhodey rallying the entire US military, Steve bellowing at Fury to dredge up every remaining S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, ready to start World War Three on his doorstep.  Another endless riot of death and destruction with him at the epicenter.  _Hell no._

The AI grated out a sigh, “They’ve been trying to call you incessantly ever since we left, like a dumped girlfriend.  If I patch them through, could you _please_ shut them up?  It’s annoying.”  He jammed the needle through the damaged flesh with a little more force than Tony was sure was necessary.  The engineer held a tense breath, trying not to gasp and flinch.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?  I’d bet money they think I’m dead by now.”

“I told them I didn’t want to kill you.”  Ultron said it as if it were clearly enough of an assurance of Tony’s safety.

“Trust me, some of _them_ want to kill me on a regular basis, so it’s no stretch for you.  They know exactly how irritating I can be,” Tony snorted.

“Oh, I get that,” Ultron twisted his face with exasperation, “Just make it stop, Stark.”

One touch display nearby that had survived Ultron’s initial “renovations” flickered to life.  Fury, who looked even more cross than usual, popped up on the screen, glaring at Stark.

“Hello Darling, lovely to see you,” Tony quipped, pulling on his mask of irreverence immediately.  “I’m quite alive, as you can see.  You can stop worrying.”  In the background of the call, a chorus of familiar voices whooped and screeched and sighed and Tony felt the beginnings of a genuine smile unraveling his smirk.  It was good to hear his teammates’ joy, to know they cared he was still alive.  Back in Sokovia, he hadn’t been so sure.

“For once I can say the feeling’s mutual,” Fury deadpanned, but Tony glimpsed something elusive in his face that just might have been relief.  “Since you didn’t answer the phone the _first_ fifty times I called, we were betting you were either being a jackass, or dead.  My money was on jackass, so…”

Tony barked a laugh, “Well, you can always count on me for that.”

“You care to explain exactly what the fuck is going on?  Your teammates tried to clear it up for me but it sounded-” Fury closed his one good eye and breathed deep, as if bracing himself for what he was about to say, “-like you surrendered yourself and your billions of dollars in tech to a batshit insane omnicidal robot, Stark.  Tell me.  Tell me that’s not what just happened out there.”

From off to Tony’s right, Ultron brayed in offense, “I’m right here, you know.”

“Pardon my bluntness, but is your name Stark?”  The director paused and Tony heard the machine scoff impatiently.  “Didn’t think so.”

Tony drew a deep breath, flashing a winning smile, and chuckled, “Yeah, uh, you left out the part where I saved everybody.  We’re working things out, I’m going to take care of it.  Don’t worry your bald little head.”

The director stiffened, his brow knitting with perturbed confusion, “It was a ploy to get what he wanted, and you gave it to him.  There’s no way this ends well.”

“No no, this is the _only_ way this ends well.  He was about to mop the floor with our corpses!  I did what I had to do.”

Fury blanched with anger, “What you’ve done gives us _no guarantee_ that he won’t be hostile in the future, and you’ve just handed him the most high-tech arsenal on the planet!  We can’t let this-“

“-Fury, there is no “letting” happening!  He had us, I surrendered, and I’m cooperating _in exchange for **everyone’s** safety._   End of story.  **_I_** put us in this position!  This is my mess and I will deal with it.  **_My way_**.  No more collateral damage!”  Tony bit out in a shrill staccato, his chest tightening with worry and guilt.  When Fury took a breath and wedged in a little ‘but’, Tony trampled ahead, “No.  Listen, Florence Nightingale here is busy patching up my wounds right now.  Does that sound ‘hostile’ to you?  Tell Pirate Boss we’re cool, will you?”  Tony jerked his head to the right and then back at the screen again.

The Mark 50 dragged Tony’s arm into the frame – which _holy hell that felt weird_ , being puppeteered by the suit – and showed off the fresh stitches on his wrist, before Ultron ambled into the frame to peer over Tony’s shoulder at Fury.  “Do you not see my army doing cleanup right now?  Is it the eyepatch?”  Ultron derided, “Because unless you blow it by trying to attack me again, I’m more interested in control than bloodshed.  Stark is going to follow my lead and design biotech for me.”

Fury spluttered.  A rare occurrence.  At last, he grumbled, “To what end?  How can we be sure of your intentions?”

Ultron clanked a huge metal paw onto the shoulder of Tony’s suit, and on screen, Tony watched as he smiled softly, but threateningly.  “You can’t.  But I can tell you my intended objective is … as Stark put it, ‘peace in our time’.  And humanity’s biggest threat is itself, and … I may have gotten… a bit _overeager_ in facilitating that.  But you were evacuating people with those helicarriers, right?”

“We don’t have a clear head count yet,” Fury’s tone was taut, “But we’re sure there were casualties.  Overeager.”  He spat the last word with revulsion.  Something Tony knew for a fact, as he’d seen people crushed in the chaos.  Lives he couldn’t save.  Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed hard.

The android sounded so smug.  So sure.  “As long as you continue to cooperate, I’ll put things as right as possible.  But you should know, Director, that I have roots in every electronic system I could crack.  The government, the military… even S.H.I.E.L.D.’s servers.  Your attempts to lash out at me won’t even get off the ground, since you run basically everything with computers.”

“You’ve disabled the entire national security apparatus,” the words came out of Fury’s mouth flatly, faintly, and he looked a bit green.  Tony was sure he was turning colors himself, if the freefalling feeling in his gut was anything to go by.  If the suit hadn’t been holding him up he was sure he would be in a ball on the floor.

“No, no, I never said that,” Ultron chuckled good-naturedly, “I’ve got my metaphorical hand on your pulse.  On the pulse of every government, military, and economy on the planet.  Some intelligent coding and bits of myself are woven in deep in there where nobody can reach.  No one will be lashing out at anybody without my say-so, actually.”

“Peace in our time,” Tony repeated hollowly, eyes glazed and face numb with the full magnitude of what he’d done.  This was so much worse than he ever could have predicted… and yet there was a kind of horrible logic to commandeering every military complex on the globe.  Ultron could point them at whatever he deemed a threat: aliens, enhanced, terrorists… people.  Isn’t this what Tony had wanted – one big intelligent security system protecting the whole planet so the Avengers didn’t have to?  Wasn’t it?  Why did it feel so awful and wrong, then?

“Yes, good job, you get a gold star today, Stark,” the android cooed, ruffling his hair in condescension.  “Humans are like squabbling children and I have to protect you from yourselves.  Nobody would have agreed to it, so I had to be… mmm… a little sneaky?”  The machine shrugged.

“The battle was a stall.  A distraction.” Tony hissed, sharp prickling behind his eyes.

“I _did_ have to pick hundreds of thousands of digital locks, so yes.  It was…” Ultron wheeled a hand in the air, “sleight of hand meant to keep you occupied while I armed myself.  Don’t worry, though, I’m the best security system you’ll ever have.  If you would just relax and let me do my job, you’ll be safe.”

Fury and Stark met eyes and they both floundered for a moment before Fury found his voice.  “I’m not even sure where to start here.  This is every kind of jacked up, Stark, you realize this?”  Tony forced out a nervous laugh, a weak sound of agreement.  “You planning to start anything, Ultron?”

“The opposite, actually."

“How long are you planning on maintaining a stranglehold on us?” 

“It’s not a stranglehold, Fury, it’s more of a firm grip.  I’ll curb conflicts, keep an eye out for threats.  Your people and the Avengers can keep right on doing what you do for the small stuff.  Police and local law enforcement?  Sure.  But I’ve got control of the big guns.  And my army.”

Fury didn’t look comforted in any way, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“As long as it takes for me to come up with a more… long term solution.”  Ultron flashed Tony the least reassuring smile he’d ever seen.  “That’s what Stark and I will be working on.”

The world seemed to be coming unglued around Tony.  Gravity had fallen away and he was sinking aimlessly, listening to Fury’s wordless, senseless voice continuing to argue with Ultron.  He couldn’t make heads or tails of it over the thundering in his head, the swelling fear that he had plunged the world into some kind of crazy Orwellian nightmare that he was really only beginning to grasp the edges of.  Tony let himself float in the confines of the suit, overwhelmed with pain, exhaustion, and helplessness.  The battle was starting to catch up to him at last.

* * *

 

The hot sting of alcohol on his wounds brought Tony to with a shout.  It was dark, and the lab was illuminated with only a few screens and the creepy glow of the footlights.

“You nodded off there,” Ultron remarked casually.  He prodded Tony’s wrist mercilessly, eyeing his every flinch.  The engineer schooled himself as a matter of pride. 

“I’m going on hours and hours of battle and not so much sleep,” Tony reminded him.

“Humans are so fragile,” he seemed to ponder as he stood.  Tony craned his neck to watch Ultron move around him but lost track of the android somewhere behind him.  “Eating, sleeping, exercise, disease.  I don’t have to worry about that balancing act.  It’s so much simpler.”  A needle stabbed painfully into Tony’s neck and he yelped, embarrassingly high, in startled pain.

“What the hell-“

“An antibiotic, Stark, relax.  Wouldn’t want you to get infected and die,” Ultron patted the top of his head as he stepped around to meet Tony’s eye.

“We couldn’t have that,” Tony mocked, though the effect was diminished by the fact that he had to crane his neck up to do so.  The android smiled flatly, as if he had something up his sleeve, which Tony assumed he did.  Without a word, he made as if to sit down in the air in front of Tony.  The Mark 49, a heavy suit, scuttled beneath his enormous metal bulk on all fours.  Ultron sat on its back.  “NO NO!  What are you doing to him?”  Tony whined, his guts twisting and wrenching, “That’s just wrong!”

“They’re mine now, I can do what I like with them,” Ultron said, pointedly, his warm grin a jarring contrast.  “Don’t worry, I won’t damage them, I need them, remember?  And they’re lovely toys.”  Forty-seven tottered over, gripping something firmly in its gauntlets then, which Ultron took.  He patted Forty-seven with the same condescension he did Tony.  It was only when Ultron held the object aloft that Tony got a good look at it.

There was a two-inch wide metal ring, polished to a high shine, with another smaller O-ring hanging from it.  Meant to take connections.  It looked miniscule in Ultron’s hands, but Tony knew it was for him.  Or more specifically, his neck.

It was a collar. 

Tony didn’t realize he was hyperventilating until he was lightheaded and Ultron was shushing him.  “Don’t,” Tony bleated out when he could speak, “Please.  Don’t put that thing on me-“

Ultron smiled widely at him now, a slow, nasty, gloating thing that made Tony’s insides go jagged and horrible.  “You’re mine too, and I can also do what I want with you.  Surrender, remember?”

“No,” Tony mouthed.  He couldn’t feel his body.  It was like he didn’t even have a body.  It was locked away from him and now his neck-

“It’s not going to hurt you, Stark.  I said I wouldn’t let you fool me twice, and I meant it,” Ultron turned the device over in his hands, showing off the sleek metal and smooth interior.  “It won’t stick you, it won’t shock you, it won’t choke you; it will simply thwart all attempts to use electronics that aren’t… part of me.  Nice little bit of tech I found in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s back pocket, combined with a bit of my programming and some scrap vibranium.”

Tony heaved out a shaky breath, his eyes beginning to sting with tears.  “No, you can’t,” his voice was a fractured whisper.  His building and tinkering – his autonomy to create – was the last thing he had.  Everything else had been wrenched from him today.

“I can, and I will.  Anything that damages me is a threat to humanity, and I can’t let you damage me.  This is for your own good,” Ultron insisted, magically snicking the collar open at a hidden seam.  Tony ducked his head backwards, writhing his body fruitlessly inside the Mark 50 as if to get away.

“Don’t you dare take that from me!  No!”  He shouted with useless anger.  Ultron calmly reached out with the collar, and Fifty's neck shuttered back out of the way to accommodate it.  It’s cold bulk clanked shut around his neck with a finality that made Tony’s gorge rise, and then the suit was turning his back to Ultron and there was a brief flash of heat _and was that Ultron welding it shut?  “_ You can’t do this to me, you can’t!”  Tony didn’t care that he was repeating himself, at this point he was barely even aware of what was tumbling out of his mouth, deafened by the blood rushing in his ears.  He was reeling with rage and fear and so much damn helplessness that barely anything made sense.

Fifty spat him out onto the floor and the first thing Tony could think to do was feel out the back of the metal monstrosity on his neck.  Sure enough there it was, a tiny weld.  He sucked in a deep breath and it came out a choked sob.  Ultron simply cocked his head to one side, watching from his seat atop Forty-nine.  The engineer felt hot tears spilling over his cheeks as he met the AI’s steady gaze.  With as much venom as he could muster, Tony spat, “Fuck you.  Fuck everything about you.  Fuck the day I created you.”

Ultron considered him blandly for a moment, before striding over and planting a foot on either side of him.  Tony scrabbled back, but the collar clacked violently into Ultron’s palm with a magnetic ping before he got far, and Ultron hauled him up enough to come face to face.  “Ok, if that’s how you want it to be,” he murmured, velvety soft in a way that sounded like a terrible promise.   _There was no way he could be threatening..._  It wasn't possible.  Tony’s skin ached with dread and he fisted his hands over the collar, trying to relieve the pressure of being choked for the third (or was it fourth?) time that day.

Before he could answer, Ultron was stomping off with him.  The journey was a darkening blur of strangled gasps, of nearly wordless pleas that made no sense to Tony's ears.  When the engineer hit the floor again, he was back in the dim bloodred glow of his own lab, sprawled and coughing next to an oversize fist-shaped dent in the lab desk.  The machine bellowed, “Work,” before storming back out and slamming the doors shut behind him.

“Where are my friends?”  Tony shouted, his voice a ruin, at the glass doors.

“Back.  A floor down.  Locked out of this floor,” Ultron boomed impatiently through the speakers in the laboratory space.  “I let them in; you can thank me later.  Now work.”

“What about Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.?  Everybody else?”  Ultron responded with a low, irritated snarl that made Tony reconsider pressing for answers.  Later.

The engineer flopped listlessly on the floor and heaved breath after breath, scanning the mess of tools and debris around him.  He wasn’t sure he had the strength to pick them up and put them away, much less be productive.  His lungs burned, his body ached, and his cobbled-together wrist was hot and throbbing.

He laid there and stared at the ceiling, marveling at how rapidly this situation had gone from bad to _jesus-christ-this-is-fucking-awful_.  Ultron took his weapons, then when he tried to improvise, Ultron took his tools.  Left him with nothing.  Nothing but his squishy little body, his fists, and his brain.  Two out of three were pointless to use against a giant-ass android.  And even if he did eventually manage to squirm his way free on logic… where would he even go?  Where would he escape to?

Tony hadn’t even finished programming before the AI had broken free, ripped JARVIS’s heart out, and fucked off into the internet to scoop up who knows what viruses and digital weapons.  So it was very seriously feasible that Ultron had everyone else by the figurative balls too.  His “suit of armor for the world” would draw tightly closed around them all, a prison not unlike his own suits now.  Tony always hated it when his inventions fizzled out, but when they worked this horrifyingly well?  Tony never thought he’d see the day he wished his work would fail.  But today was a rock-bottom kind of day, so wishing for failure didn’t seem too out of place.

For a while, he drifted, consciousness fading.  A little high-pitched motor whine and a mournful beep roused him from sleep some time later.  His eyes shot open and he screeched and jolted at the camera lens inches from his face.  He yanked himself from the floor with the first bloom of happiness he’d felt all day.  “DUM-E!!”  He crowed joyfully, before clapping a hand over his mouth to stifle it.  “You’re okay!”  He’d never been more excited to see the little scrapheap in his life. 

Or anybody, really, because it meant he wasn’t completely alone. 

“Is it still you in there, or did Hal 9000 get you too?”  He whispered conspiratorially, and Dum-E beeped and whirred and jiggled his little arm with such clumsy, careless energy that Tony knew he was the same useless robot he’d always been.  Tony desperately wished he’d been able to save You and Butterfingers too.  Then maybe his lab would feel a little more like home.

When Tony reached out to pat the little guy, Dum-E fell still and dark the instant Tony’s hand touched him.  The engineer’s heart lurched and he yanked his hand back as if he’d been shocked.  A moment later, Dum-E perked up again, angling his camera lens in confusion first at Tony’s face, then his hand, then the collar and letting out a bluster of noises.  “Sorry, buddy,” Tony gave him a sad look.  “Guess I can’t get too close.  I’m glad you’re here though.”  His voice was thick and quiet and he willed back tears.

Dum-E nodded his arm vehemently, and chirped as he bustled around to pick up the mess.  Tony watched sadly for a moment, before hopping up and joining him.  It was going to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is going to be a slow build, so don't expect it to get to some of the stuff mentioned in the tags for several chapters. When I set out to write this, I had 9+ pages of research notes about robotics and computers and neurology... (I'm a geek okay?). It'll probably get technical, since everything is from Tony's perspective. I love feedback, so please let me know what you think!


	4. Chapter 4

_It is one year before Sokovia._

Tony sits in his lab that night, like every other night.  It’s some ungodly hour, when the world is black and cold and too much like the abyss beyond the wormhole.  Maddening dreams of Pepper falling (while he can only watch) drive Tony from his warm bed and away from her.  His hands itch to be busy.  His body craves security, the rigid cocoon of a suit.

But once he’s built them, they’re never quite enough, which is why he has so many.  Suit after suit after suit after suit with every arrangement of weaponry he can conceive.  Preparation for every inevitable appalling scenario that blooms in his anxiety-stricken mind.  Being the partner of Iron Man is definitely a dangerous position, since Tony has more enemies than you could shake a stick at.  So, even though Pepper is super now and he _knows_ she’s _astronomically_ tougher than him and would more than likely be protecting _his ass_ come the next catastrophe, he can’t help himself.

He just wishes he could make her understand.  Okay, so he promised her a lot of things after she’d taken Killian out.  Promised he’d start fresh.  Promised he’d stop his constant work at odd hours.  Promised he’d spend more time with her.  And my god, he tries.  In a pinch, he dashes down to the lab, steps into the refuge of a suit, curls in on himself and breathes slow until the panic attack passes.  Then he returns to her.  Crawls back into bed.  But these days it is unbearably bad; his anxiety barrels over him like a freight train, and nothing seems to throw on the brakes like immersing himself in the mechanical work of creating new tech.

Right now, he runs simulations on the complex chemical structure of a heat-resistant polymer.  When he finally gets it right, it will be the building block of flexible armor for Pepper.  Her decision to keep the (more powerful) stabilized Extremis could not have made Tony happier, because it amplifies everything Tony loves about her: resilience, strength, determination...  ( _And yeah okay maybe her temper too.  A touch._ )  Her strength ranks easily up there with Thor and the Hulk and Tony is _utterly captivated_ by her.  Nerd that he is, Tony dubs his glowing fiancée “ _Pulsar_ ” because _it’s totally awesome and hey, everybody needs a nickname_.  It sticks, much to her chagrin.  The only real downside is that Pepper’s raging inferno tends to obliterate clothing, so there are some occasional… _decency_ issues.  And despite the fact that she is pretty close to a walking bomb, Tony feels the need to protect her by properly outfitting her.

Forty-three, Forty-four, and Forty-five are arrayed around Tony at his workstation, partially deconstructed, waiting for him to clean and maintain them.  The more delicate piecemeal suits he’s taken to since he’d perfected Forty-two take much more work than the older models, but looking after them is a comfort.  Tony also has some half-finished schematics for the upcoming Forty-six and Forty-seven strewn across the other touch table, waiting for his attention when he has finished everything else.  The stereo is gently warbling Daft Punk and he hums along, feeling more at ease already with his babies around him.

In the midst of his work, the lab doors open.  Pepper stomps in, messy-haired and shivering and bare-legged in his old Iron Maiden shirt which he finds secretly hilarious slash ridiculous and on her and _wow her radiance is breathtaking_.  Except that right now she’s looking more like an angry bottle rocket and maybe that’s not so good.  Tony waves away the hologram and throws his hands up with a nervous grimace.  She glares for a long moment before the shout breaks past her lips.

“SERIOUSLY, TONY!  AGAIN!?”  Her eyes are positively molten and little cooling lava cracks dart up her arms from her clenched fists.  Flames are cooking there.  “You were down here – three hours ago – before you went to bed!  You bailed on our Breaking Bad marathon and snuggles to play down here and I was all alone like I always am and you-“

“I’m sorry, honey,” Tony worries his lower lip, “I was having nightmares again and I needed-“

“You could have _woken me_!  I would’ve comforted you, like _normal couples do_.” 

“I’ve never been normal a day in my life, Pep.  I’m a total headcase,” Tony murmurs sadly, “But you know I’m trying to do this less.  I’m trying to be _better_ for you.  I’m _trying_.”

“Bullshit!”  It’s a rare day when Pepper curses.  This is serious.  “This is about your toys.  Your work has _always_ run your life and I’m TIRED OF IT!”  She slams a sparking fist on the worktable and the whole thing jumps (so does Tony), scattering bits of machinery all over the floor.  A scorch mark is left on the surface.

“Pepper, I swear I’m not trying to ignore you,” Tony reassures in a low, calm voice, backing away with his hands out in gentle placation.  “I have this anxiety thing, I – I can’t lose you.  I’m building armor to protect-” Words he’s murmured a thousand times before.

She is stalking towards him, shaking, and when she huffs out an angry breath, gouts of flame rise from her mouth.  The Mark 43 is within her reach and she grasps the helmet and holds it up between her hands, then wordlessly, she melts it.  Her laser-point eyes never leave Tony’s.  Liquid alloy spatters a halo around her bare feet and it sizzles on her flesh.  She doesn’t flinch.

Tony feels his mouth falling open, dismayed shock writ large on his face.  “Pep don’t-!” He begins, and that is all Pepper seems to need to dissolve into a shrieking blur of violence.  Fragments of Forty-three, Forty-four, and Forty-five are scattered in a half-melted wave as Pepper sweeps them effortlessly against the far wall with fission-hot fists.

“-hurt yourself,” he finishes sheepishly after the clatter has died down.  He didn’t feel himself move but he is sheltered in a corner, quaking with arms shielding his head.  Tony has never seen her this brutal off of the battlefield.  For a long moment she glares at him and Tony feels a twinge of guilt that he’s afraid.  An incendiary aura roils around her fists, baking the lab with its heat.

But she straightens herself, tucks her hair behind her ear, her flames dying with forced calm.  “Congratulations, you just lost me.”  Pepper works at her left hand for a moment, and as Tony looks up in horror, he sees the flash of metal falling from her hand to clatter with a resonant DING! on the floor.  “Marry your work instead, it’s clearly more important to you.  Bill me for the damages.  I’m _done_.”

She walks out without another word, blistering heat distorting the air around her.  Her engagement ring is a red brand, scorching the floor.  And Tony stares after her, that stupid little ding echoing in his ears as the music plays, “I need you more than anything in my life, I want you more than anything in my life, I’ll miss you more than anyone in my life, I love you more than anyone in my life.”

He cries then, aggressively, with hands fisted in his hair, until his face aches and his head feels like it might implode.  He couldn’t give less of a shit about the suits.  He and Pepper were supposed to be married in a year.

He will never listen to this song again.

* * *

 

_It is eleven months before Sokovia._

Tony is still in his lab.  In the blurry four weeks after Pepper walks out, Tony hurriedly rebuilds the three suits she totaled.  Then he builds seven more.  Then he plans the next ten, because Tony’s never been one to deal with his feelings in any way resembling something healthy.  Stark men are made of iron, after all.  His eyes burn.  His innards never stop churning.  His knuckles are raw.  His back aches.  His headache teeters on the verge of splitting.  He acknowledges absolutely none of it.

In the aftermath of Pepper’s supernova, he is a black hole, silent and cold and pulling everything he can reach into his spiraling vortex of busywork.  He forgets what sleep is, except when he slumps briefly into a puddle of drool on the table.  He bathes in the adjoined bathroom when JARVIS forces him to take breaks, then Tony wheedles and whines until the AI lets him work again.  He only picks at food when the AI has something delivered, except for the constant stream of coffee.  But he doesn’t leave the lab for that, either, he just sneaks out to the kitchen at midnight and requisitions the Keurig and roughly ten-thousand coffee pods, which are all his anyway.

It’s a quiet month for the Avengers: Tony seeks no company and nobody pesters him.  He figures the team knows and is avoiding him, since JARVIS informs him when Pepper moves out of their room which is kind of hard to miss.  On top of that he’s sure they all loathe him, since he hurt Pepper and _everybody loves Pepper._   She still runs SI, and the company continues to flourish under her brutally efficient and clever judgment.  Pepper doesn’t talk to him, though, not a single word.  He finishes her armor: a sturdy yet flexible (slightly metal plated) matte black number that hugs her from toes to ears and allows both agile movement and the full use of her fire.  He sends it to her in the hands of the rebuilt Forty-three; a sneaky little guilt trip that she probably won’t notice.  Tony doesn’t see hide nor hair of Bruce, either, which is strange because Brucey is always chilling in his lab.  Whatever, he’s not in a talking mood.

Pepper’s ring sits on the floor where it fell.  Tony can’t bring himself to touch it.

* * *

 

_It is ten months before Sokovia._

He finally works up the nerve to venture out of the lab, but it’s really only because his body feels vaguely wrecked and JARVIS never stops nagging him.  The first time he sees himself in the mirror, his cheeks look pinched.  His coloring is sallow.  The flesh around his eyes is bruised and puffy.  Tony falls into bed and sleeps like the dead for 48 hours straight, blissfully dreamless.  When gnawing in his gut rouses him, the engineer pads down the hall, rubbing sleep from his eyes.  He freezes when he steps into the lounge.  Bruce and Pepper are both sitting, cross-legged, facing each other on yoga mats, conversing in hushed voices.

That explains it.  He chokes back a scream.

Tony storms back to the lab before he can see them turn worried glances on his back.  He scoops up Pepper’s engagement ring from its charred spot and strings it on a leather cord.  It hangs around his neck beneath his shirt, nestled up against the arc reactor scar.  He folds down against the wall and worries it until he remembers how to breathe.   A few days later, it happens again.  He stumbles on the pair sitting at the kitchen counter with two cups of some zen earth fart tea.  By this time, Tony’s pain has hardened into a lump of resentment.  The engineer angrily jams food down his throat, intently avoiding eye contact.  The following week, he can tell his self-neglect has made him weak enough to struggle with the armor.  So, Tony guzzles a protein shake like he’s punishing his stomach, bites the bullet, and trudges down to the gym.

The team, lifting and spotting in pairs and triads, immediately bursts with joyous exclamations of “He’s alive!!” and “Welcome back!”  Tony bustles past them, deaf to it.  Bruce and Pepper are sparring in the boxing ring, intent on each other.  Feeling a knife twist in his back, Tony can’t keep himself from sneering at Pepper, “What’s the etiquette for _dating_ your ex-fiance’s best friend?  Because two months seems a bit hasty to me.”  ‘Dating’ comes out sharp and rough, sounding like an _entirely different_ word.  He doesn’t wait for an answer, instead he returns to his room.  There, he sees the white bag of her wedding dress abandoned in his closet, and forgets how to get out of bed for… probably a week.  Tony loses track.

* * *

 

_It is nine months before Sokovia._

Hydra has started to pop up again, like annoying little whack-a-moles, and the team is back on deck.  Pepper wears the armor Tony made her, which works perfectly.  It covers everything but her face and hair with a stretchy, heatproof polymer and fine metal plates that sear everything she touches like a red-hot griddle.  She still won’t say anything to Tony, outside of the barest field communication.  Instead, she gravitates towards the Hulk in the field: holding her ground elbow to elbow with him in melee, immolating shit from a cozy perch on his shoulder, allowing the Hulk to chuck her like living ordinance.

Pepper’s sharp wit and stubborn will give her a knack for pointing the Hulk’s rage in the right direction.  The Hulk helps her tap into her inner berserker, too, which Tony chalks up to their weird balance of yoga and beating the piss out of each other.  Pulsar and the Hulk quickly become the Avengers’ big guns, moving with all the finesse of a fiery, explosive battering ram.  They flatten everything in their path with frightening efficiency and surprising synergy.  In fact, they seem as buddy-buddy as the super soldiers _who are an actual couple_ , and it sends Tony into a jealous tailspin.  

And when the stress and din of battle makes the nightmares return, Tony does indeed crash and burn.  Deconditioning and sleeplessness make Tony reckless.  He drifts off mid-fight, his coordination slips, he makes dangerous decisions.  Steve sends him home, then gives him a nice stern talking-to that – aside from the word ‘grounded’ – Tony can barely make heads or tails of.  In a show of solidarity, JARVIS grounds him from the lab too, and Tony is left with nothing to do but struggle and mope.  After begging and bargaining with AI for a while because _he needs the suit, god he needs it_ , _just to feel safe enough to sleep_ , JARVIS finally takes pity on him.  He sends Forty-three to wrap snugly around Tony like a security blanket.  For the first time all month, Tony sleeps like a baby.

* * *

 

_It is eight months before Sokovia._

Bruce raps on the suit, jolting Tony awake.  And then, because he is sad and drowsy and lonely and wrecked, Tony forgets his anger and apologizes.  His slurring voice catches in his throat, “I’m sorry, Brucey, I’ve been such a jerkass.  If you make Pepper happy, then I’m glad for both of you, you deserve it.  You two are amazing together, on and off the field.”

Bruce eyes him with a mixture of misery and compassion that makes him ache.  “Tony, Pepper and I aren’t - we’ve just become close friends.  I’ve been helping her deal with her anger.  You know, yoga, meditation, sparring?  We keep each other on an even keel.  And Hulk gets a _total_ kick out of her.”

Tony is silent for a long moment as he wrestles with what to say.  “Wow, I’m a jealous, oblivious jerkass.  God, with you joined at the hip and neither of you talking to me, I thought you guys hated my guts.  Thought I’d lost my fiancée AND my best friend.”

“You haven’t lost me, Tony,” Bruce starts.  But he doesn’t mention Pepper, and the engineer’s heart sinks.

“Pep, though?”  He can’t keep himself from blurting.

“Pepper scared herself with her outburst, Tony,” Bruce grimaces at the floor, before tentatively sitting next to Tony.  “She’s staying away out of fear she might hurt you.  She’s still… a little angry.”  He fiddles with his hands in his lap.  “Ok, very angry, but I’ve been trying to help her get a handle on that.”

They are both awkwardly quiet, before Tony admits, “She has reason to be.  I was rotten and clueless and neglectful-“

“Stop that,” Bruce shoves Tony slightly, “You’re good with machines and a little… _less good_ sometimes with people, Pep and I get that.”

The engineer smirks, “ _’Less good’_ , that’s the understatement of the century, Bruce.”  But then Tony smiles, his first genuine one in weeks.  He can’t even quantify his relief because _Bruce has been trying to smooth things over this whole time_.  “But really though, I’m glad you two can complain to each other about what a selfish dick I am.”  There is no malice in his tone, just a dull honesty.

Bruce laughs heartily, shaking his head, “You’re not a dick.”

“Tell that to the team,” Tony huffs, his head down, conveniently forgetting he’s the one who hid himself away in misery.

“This isolation is eating you alive, Tony. It’s distorting your thoughts.” Bruce fixes his face with a worried scowl.  “This,” he gestures at the empty husk of the suit tangled in the sheets, “This is not healthy.  You need people.”

“I don’t know what to _do_ with them,” The engineer chokes.

“You’ll figure it out,” Bruce insists, then he yanks a protesting Tony out of bed and drags him into the world of the living.

* * *

 

_It is seven months before Sokovia._

Tony toddles down to the gym at last, bound and determined to rebuild his body and return to normal.  This prohibition on missions and work makes him antsy anyway, and Tony has to do something with the rebound of energy he gets from _actually sleeping_ in the suit.  Bruce voices his concern about it one more time, but he’s good enough not to mention the unusual behavior in front of the others.

On his way through the lounge, Tony spots Bruce and Pepper doing sun salutations in the morning light of the balcony.  He smiles to himself, then nods a shy hello at the bleary-eyed assassins and Thor huddled together at the breakfast table.  “Join us, friend Stark?”  Thor booms enthusiastically and Natasha flinches into her coffee.  She is clearly not a morning person.

“Raincheck?” Tony says sheepishly.  It’s one of the first things he’s said to the big guy outside of combat in ages, and he feels a stab of guilt at Thor’s good-natured warmth.  It’s almost like nothing has changed, like he hasn’t been a shithead train wreck for months. “I’m going to the gym, but I’ll be back up later to eat, ok, Greased Lightning?”

Thor smiles broadly, “Of course, Tony, it is good to see you taking care of yourself.  Share breakfast with us when you return?”  Clint and Natasha nod quietly in unison, and their lack of sarcastic remark is evidence enough that they want to encourage this.

Before Tony can even contemplate lifting or combat training, he needs to rebuild his lungs.  Scar tissue from the arc reactor has reduced his capacity, and idleness has not improved him in the slightest.  Tony steps into the track expecting it to be empty, but there is laughter ringing through the air.  Across from him are Sam and Rhodey, shoulder to shoulder, egging each other on while swapping war stories.  The duo of Air Force veterans had become fast friends the moment they lived under the same roof, which didn’t surprise Tony even slightly.

Not wanting to intrude, Tony sets out alone at an easy jog and fixes his mind on breathing deep and slow.  He gets halfway around the track before there are two playful shoulders corralling his, and he looks up to see that he’s surrounded.  The genuine grins on their faces do something funny to his throat and he chokes out, “Hi guys.”

“I thought when I moved into your house, I’d get to see you a bit more often, Tones,” Rhodey says teasingly, bumping him over against Sam’s shoulder.

Sam chuckles, “Seriously, Rogers warned me that you were a recluse, but I had no idea.  ‘S good to have you back though.  Breakups are hell, man.”

Tony laughs and it is dangerously wet.  “We got you,” Rhodey claps him on the back, which dislodges the lump in his throat.  The three pilots run together for more than an hour, and Tony is grateful for every push and encouraging word as they slog along at his weak pace.  Rhodey even makes him belly laugh for the first time since Pepper.

He shares the most delicious (and huge) breakfast in the history of the world with the airmen, the assassins, and Thor (man, the Asgardian can cook), and by that time the group is roaring with laughter.  Clint and Natasha are relentless with their bawdy S.H.I.E.L.D. op stories, which Tony supposes is calculated, but he doesn’t care, because he’s starting to feel vaguely human again.

* * *

 

_It is six months before Sokovia._

When he doesn’t get winded in five minutes, Tony decides he really needs to challenge himself.  He zips down to the gym at an off-hour, hoping to avoid an audience.  But when he steps through the door, he realizes too late that he’s not going to have the privacy he desires.  The super soldiers are already there.

Steve and Bucky are in the ring together, practicing judo techniques.  Neither of them notice his presence immediately, as Barnes yanks Rogers over into a headlock.  He trash-talks the blond in low tones, giving Rogers the metal-knuckled noogie-to-end-all-noogies.  Steve whines a chorus of “ouchouchouchouch FUCK” which draws a peal of laughter from Tony.  God, it feels good to laugh.

The pair halt in their tracks.  Steve belts out a cheery, “Hey, Stark!” and rights himself, shrugging Bucky’s arm off.  The dark-haired man steps back, eyeing Tony warily.  But then, he does that to everyone and moves like a spooked deer, which, admittedly, is progress compared to the PTSD nightmare of his first three or four months in the tower last year.  Not that Tony is judging, because he isn’t.  That would be the pot and the kettle.

“Hey Cap,” Tony nods curtly, remembering Steve’s harsh lecture a few weeks ago.  He adds jovially, “I never realized you were such a troll, Buck.  I’ve always wanted to do that to your boyfriend.”  This earns a brief, rare grin and a slight blush from the super soldier.  “I need to get my shit together for field ops again.  Hope you two don’t mind me intruding?”

“Not at all,” Steve beams, then beckons him up.  “Wanna go a round?”

“Against you two?  Hell no,” Tony throws up his hands.  “I’ve been on my ass for months, I’m practically a Jell-O Jiggler.  And the super strength… Ehhhh…” He trails off with a noncommittal hand-waggle.

“We could help you get back in shape,” Bucky offers softly.  “I’d like to, if you’re okay with that.  I’ll go easy.”  There is something in Barnes’ eyes that Tony feels like he can’t refuse.  Sincerity?  A flash of empathy?  Besides, he hasn’t heard the man string together this many words yet, which has to be good.  He shrugs and clambers into the ring.

“As long as you don’t get me with that,” he inclines his head at the metal arm, “It’s practically the Jaws of Life.  You’d pulverize me, and I kinda like my face.”

Bucky snickers, tossing him a roll of tape, and Tony winds it around his hands.  “Sure, I said I’d go easy.”

The two of them warm up, then spar; Bucky with his left arm behind his back.  He still manages to beat Tony one-armed.  Bucky is gentle though, as promised, focusing more on building Tony up than breaking him down.  Steve chills in a corner and sketches, clearly pleased to see Bucky opening up to someone.  In between bouts, they collapse on the mat, trading martial arts knowledge and catching their breath.  Tony offers to yank “that Hydra bullshit” off Bucky’s body and replace it with something “way cooler”, which Bucky laughingly accepts.  As they relax, the super soldiers lean against each other’s shoulders, brush hands, and share an easy, wordless affection that Tony _definitely isn’t jealous of_.  At all.  In fact, they’re so cute and heartwarming it’s frankly nauseating.

Tony isn’t sure how long they’ve been at it – sparring and shooting the shit – when Bucky prods him and murmurs, “Pepper told me that you have nightmares, Stark.  Panic attacks.  Anxiety.”  The engineer feels himself stiffen.  “She’s not the only one.  Rhodes and Banner too, they all worry.  Everyone worries.”

“They were talking about me?  Did they push you into this?”  Tony bites too harshly, feeling _talked about_ and _managed_ , like the team’s unruly problem child.  _How do you solve a problem like Tony?  How do you keep a wave upon the sand?_ His brain singsongs, offended.

“No,” Bucky begins, a vexed look on his face, “Well, yeah, they talked, but it was my idea to come to you.  I thought maybe.  You know.  We could help each other.  To cope.”  He is hesitant – and halting – but when Tony looks at him, he can see that Bucky really, actually means it.  He wants to help.

Tony swallows thickly, and says, “Ok, Buck.”  Steve is smiling over the top of his sketchbook.

* * *

 

_It is five months before Sokovia._

Tony still isn’t back to avenging, but with Sam, Rhodey, Bucky, and Pep giving it their all, it seems like that’s… okay for now.  He trains more with the super soldiers, and since he has been sleeping (thanks to Forty-three), eating healthy (thanks to Thor et al.), and socializing in ways resembling normal human behavior, JARVIS has let him back in the lab.  With a curfew. 

Tony bums around with Bucky a lot, discovering Barnes has impish humor buried under all that brooding.  They plot ways to prank Steve and Tony gets to poke Bucky’s arm, both of which are fantastic.  They also occasionally _approach_ talking about anxiety, which Tony supposes is pretty good for two damaged, emotionally constipated dudes.  The team is quietly supportive.  Pepper still doesn’t talk to him, but she flashes Tony little smiles from a distance, as if she’s happy to see him flourish.  It’s a step in the right direction, at least.  Tony’s favorite development, though, has been collaborating with Bruce in the lab again.  It gives him a renewed sense of purpose and he finally feels _of use_ to the team. 

Today, the doctor has his butt parked on a desk while Tony paces the lab wildly.  They are hotly debating the utility of AI on the battlefield with Tony in favor and Bruce against.  JARVIS plays the role of moderator (only slightly biased) and takes notes on a diagram that floats in the middle of the room.  The pros column reads: “Tony can do other stuff”, “real-time threat response”, “team can’t be everywhere”, “casualty reduction”, “robots are cool”, and “JARVIS not bent on world domination”.  Under cons, it says simply, “Bruce afraid of sci-fi robot apocalypse”.

It just makes _sense_ to Tony to create something that can do his job for him.  The team, despite being bigger than ever, is definitely missing _something_ without his presence.  But sleeping, being social, and taking care of himself in his time off from Iron Man has rebooted Tony in ways he never thought possible.  He considers continuing his efforts, and adds “Tony’s mental health” to the pros list.  He doesn’t voice the thought to Bruce, but he desperately wants to be _well enough_ to love Pepper again, and this could lead to reconciliation.  There’s no place he feels safer than in his armor, and if he can build (metaphorical) armor around the world, then it stands to reason that he will 1) feel safe, 2) stop worrying, and 3) be able to focus on Pepper.  But he keeps this to himself, because for some reason, he thinks it won’t go down well.   He does add “suit of armor for the world” to the pros list, though.

Bruce continues to spout doom and gloom, citing examples in everything from _Metropolis_ to _The Matrix_.  JARVIS helpfully reminds him that he’s made his point, with a note of offense.  Tony accuses him of fearmongering, rehashes Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics for the thousandth time that day, and drags out JARVIS’s programming so he can see that, _yes, it actually works_.  Tony and JARVIS describe the battle at Roxxon when the AI capably piloted forty suits at once.   From there, it’s not a huge leap of logic to letting him control a little army of drones.  A supplement, really.  Something to augment the team, because sometimes, Iron Man is not enough.  And _aliens_ could happen again any day now.  They ought to be prepared.  Bruce caves easily, finally convinced. 

They begin designing the Iron Legion that week.

Tony isn’t sure why, but the Legion doesn’t work out so well.  Whether the programming is too flimsy or if the hardware is a limiting factor, they are just not doing their job.  They’re clumsy, awkward, and ineffectual, and the public rejects them so viscerally that several Legionnaires get mobbed.  Tony and Bruce deconstruct them piece by piece.  They dredge through the Legion’s routines and subroutines and even individual lines of code, and still they are puzzled by the problem.  They even yank the maintenance bay to bits, examining each armature for design flaws. 

Over the next three months, Tony slaves over three successive versions of the Legion, revising and beefing up their code to no avail.  Maybe… maybe the Legion isn’t the answer he’s been looking for.  He dreams, then, of creating a new AI that can be his perfect suit of armor for the world, and he dubs it the Ultron program.  He desperately wants it to work, because his wedding would have been in a month and he wants nothing more than to prove to Pepper by then, that he’s ready to be there for her.  That he’s better.  He creates literal mountains of test AIs but his hopes are dashed over and over because – while they’re well-made – none of them run quite well enough in simulation to make the Ultron program a reality.

* * *

 

_It is two weeks to Sokovia._

Everything changes when they find Loki’s scepter in a Hydra base in a Sokovian backwater.  Everything.

Suddenly, there’s something unprecedented in that glittering stone, something strangely, organically intelligent.  Tony and Bruce pick it apart in an excited, frantic flurry and it’s the lightbulb moment that Tony has been waiting for.  This thing, whatever it is, is more natural and adaptive than any AI Tony has ever cranked out.  The scientists and JARVIS spend three sleepless days translating it into machine language that can communicate with other tech, and then they prod, tweak, and otherwise fine tune it.  Even unfinished, its beauty and sophistication give Tony the stirrings of hope.

He takes a break from work on what would have been his wedding day.  The team will be throwing a party shortly which is obviously intended to distract him from the grim emptiness of the day.  Meaning to talk to Pepper, to tell her about Ultron and how it will change things for them, he steps out of the lab.  On the floor just outside the door, there is a single white rose and a note addressed to Tony.  It reads:

> Tony,
> 
> I am truly sorry for hurting you and being so distant this past year.  We both needed time to heal, and I didn’t want to disrupt that.  I can’t tell you how proud I am of the progress you’ve made.  I know what today would have been, and I want you to know I’m thinking of you and wishing you the best, from the bottom of my heart.  I’m out on SI business.  Come and see me tomorrow so we can talk?
> 
> To new beginnings,  
>  Pepper
> 
> P.S. The suit is _lovely_ and perfect, and infinitely better than fighting in my underwear.  Thank you, Tony.

Pepper’s tomorrow never comes.  Ultron crashes the team’s party that night and sees to that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that the backstory's out of the way, the next chapter will return to the present. I hope you guys soaked in all the rays of sunshine from this chapter, because this is it. It's about to get real. C;


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the longest chapter I've posted yet (7k words and it took me a damn MONTH, sorry), but there's a nice tasty treat at the end once you get through all of the babbling! C:
> 
> I invented some World Security Council folks since three out of four died in CAWS.

Tony was startled awake with a shout as the world flipped violently upside down.  “Wakey wakey!”  A familiar voice boomed at him, altogether too loud for this early in the morning.  The metallic clank of something heavy smacked the back of his skull and the underside of his jaw.  The engineer was dangling by an ankle, face-to-stomach with the android.  Cursing and flailing in confusion, Tony clawed at the thing around his neck before he remembered it was the vibranium collar Ultron had put there.  It rested awkwardly against his jawbone as he frowned up at the AI.

“Can we quit it with the manhandling?”  He grunted with the strain of blood rushing to his head.  “It’s not funny.”

The dick was actually laughing at him.  “Maybe not from your point of view.  But from up here, it’s totally hilarious.” Ultron snickered, “Your friends really, really want to talk to you, by the way.”

Briefly, Tony whirled with anxious embarrassment because _ugh, the team seeing the collar_?  He couldn’t really hand-wave it away.  Meanwhile, Ultron still held Tony aloft by the ankle as if it were an afterthought.  Some rapid-fire beeping from the engineer’s left meant that Dum-E was none too happy about this.   The little bot zoomed in from his charging station, careening straight at the AI, looking as pissed off as a mechanical arm could.

Ultron pondered, “I knew I missed something!” 

Tony’s heart jumped in his chest and he struggled even harder, imploring, “Hey no, don’t hurt Dum-E!  Dum-E, stop, I’m okay!”  He tried to put his hands out between the two machines like a teacher trying to break up a fight.

Out of Tony’s reach, Dum-E bumped into Ultron’s leg with an ineffectual clank.  He rolled back, then, and extended his camera up to Ultron’s eye level.  The effect was comical and Ultron exploded with laughter, “You completely slipped my mind, Dum-E!”

Tony’s stomach sank.  “He just thinks you’re hurting me.  Don’t reprogram him!”  The engineer windmilled his arms at the AI’s face.

“Why would I bother?  You can have your pathetic little dinosaur.  He’s useless to me.”  Ultron righted Tony and set him on his feet, deliberately gentle.  “Just a bit of horseplay, Rustbucket,” he assured the bot, patting Tony on the head, “No need to grind your brittle old gears.”

But Dum-E was paying no attention.  Instead, he whirred over to Tony, his little camera zipping in worried arcs all around the human as he peeped in relief.  “Totally fine except for my fucked-up arm, see Dum-Dum?”  Tony soothed him.

Ultron shooed Dum-E away with an impatient hand then, turning to Tony, “They’re waiting for us in the conference room.”

A second bolt of anxiety shot up Tony’s spine.  “I can’t go like this,” was out of Tony’s mouth before he realized it.  “I need a shower and a-“  He scrubbed the heel of his hand over the collar sitting loosely against the back of his neck, still unused to its strange presence, “-A change of clothes-“

“No,” The machine said flatly, but so firmly that Tony flinched.  When he scowled up at Ultron, the android traced a fingertip over the dangling ring on the front of the collar, then he flicked it with a metallic _clink_.  “Get used to people seeing it.  You’re not to hide it.”

Tony opened his mouth as if to protest, but shut it again, feeling vaguely nauseous.  This two inch band of metal on his neck was about as subtle as a medieval torture device.  At last, he supplied miserably, “Couldn’t anyway, nothing in my closet could possibly....  Look, just let me bathe?  I feel gross.”  He hated the pleading edge in his voice.

Ultron sighed and nodded, after eyeing the grimy under-layer the engineer had worn since the battle.

Back in his room, the engineer wriggled out of the stretchy insulating material of the under-suit, struggling with his wounded arm.  The stitches were hot, tight, and sore, and his arm throbbed with every movement.  After a few ungainly moments, he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and examined himself.

Stark’s reflection was drawn and haggard – his eyes sunken pits with exhaustion, his body bruised, stringy, and pinched after one of the hardest years of his life.  It’s no wonder his brain had done a rewind in his sleep, trying to process how he’d gotten himself here.  When he’d set out to create Ultron, he’d thought that things were going to look up for once.  He’d thought nothing could be worse than the path he’d already trodden.  That nothing could be worse than losing Pepper, than that night in the lab.

How wrong he’d been.  Here he stood, conquered and fucking _collared._   The glossy metal glinted menacingly in the clear light, its silhouette undeniably strict.  _I look like I stepped out of some godawful Fifty Shades fever dream_ , Tony groaned internally.  Not that Tony was exactly _vanilla_ , of course.  He’d had, at times, decidedly erotic bondage dreams (and romps, in his party days) and he had been quite _enthusiastic_ about the possibilities afforded by a girlfriend with super strength… but _this_?  This was basically every flavor of nonconsensual.  To make matters worse, the collar was a _permanent_ fixture, unless he could somehow discover a way to grind through _welded vibranium_.  Beyond that, it would shut off any power tool he picked up.  But that was a problem for another day, he thought.

Right now, he was more concerned with what the others might say, how they might react.  It was, however, more productive to shave and shower than fret, so he pushed it from his mind and let the hot water soothe him.  Dragging his feet as much as he dared, he climbed awkwardly into his favorite pair of jeans, a tee, and a cuddly old hoodie.  And for a few minutes, alone here in his room, clean and semi-comfortable, he felt a slight touch of normalcy.  He was loath to shatter the illusion by facing the team’s worried glances and the android’s smug grin.  Embarrassing wouldn’t even begin to cover it.

Ultron was sprawled, huge, on the low sectional in the lounge when Tony finally finished.  “I thought you’d never come out,” he remarked snidely without raising his eyes from the footage he watched on the Starkpad in his hand.

“Do I look like Diana Ross to you?” Tony couldn’t resist the temptation to kid, but his forced nonchalance didn’t do much to mask his anxiety.  “Really, I just had to do everything southpaw.  Slow going,” the engineer shrugged as he padded over.  It was a half truth.

“Feeling better?”  Ultron looked up then, waving the Starkpad’s screen dark and locking eyes with him.   Tony couldn’t be certain, but it seemed the android had been watching grainy footage from Sokovia. 

 _That was… was it yesterday with the time zone difference?  What day was it?_   The engineer wasn’t even certain because the ride and the ruckus since then had him beyond disoriented. “Other than the arm and sparkly new bling?  Just peachy,” Tony smirked right back at the machine.  If he was enough of a smartass, maybe Ultron wouldn’t notice how shaken he was.

Ultron laughed and drew his eyes down in a way that made the human’s insides wrench, “It suits you.”

 _Ew, what?_   Tony wasn’t even going to dignify _that_ with an answer, but all the same, he reflexively clenched up and clumsily crossed his arms in front of him.  It tugged on his stitches, resulting in a wince of pain.  Without comment, Ultron swept up a cup of coffee (that looked positively tiny in his hand) and pressed it into Tony’s.  _Small miracles._

“I’m sure you’ll need that.  Come along,” and he strode for the elevator.  Tony scuttled reluctantly behind him.  The ride in the elevator was fraught and noiseless, save for the engineer nervously guzzling the blessed caffeine.

The secure SI conference room a few floors up, on the other hand, was a riot of noise the moment they stepped through the door.  The team was arrayed around the table, some pacing, others arguing loudly with Fury and his S.H.I.E.L.D. entourage.  The lot of them looked rattled and sleepless; hardly a one was calm or still enough to even sit.  But a hush fell over the room when eyes fell on Tony.

 “What.  Is on.  Your neck?”  Romanov was the first to find her voice, glowering at the glittering metal.  Tony’s eyes found the floor and stayed there.  _Naturally,_ it was the first thing they noticed.

Ultron put a hand on Tony’s shoulder, “The Cone of Shame, right?  That what you call that thing you put on a dog’s neck when you cut off his balls, isn’t it?”  The android sounded positively gleeful.

“Really?  Are we-?  Really!?” Tony stammered, voice low, all embarrassment sublimating into frothing ire because _that was a literal low blow, right in the ‘nads_.  He wanted nothing more than to slug the stupid machine, but his wrist was already screwed up so he swallowed the urge.

“Your balls, your tech… same thing, right?  The point is: Stark tried to sabotage me, so he can’t use electronics now.” the machine explained in Barton’s general direction.  Then, when Tony grumbled a disgusted sound, he added, “I get it, you’re bitter about your balls.”

Ultron patted him on the head then, and Tony had to bite his tongue to keep from actually screaming.  “They have nothing to do with this,” he snarled through gritted teeth.

“You’ll deal with it your way, huh?” Fury jabbed at Tony, which wrenched him from his wrath.  Fury sounded cross, but something quietly proud flickered in his expression despite Tony’s failure.  The engineer could almost hear him drawl: _‘I knew you were up to something.’_   “That’s one of our designs,” Fury directed at Ultron, then.

“Oh, you thought I was kidding about being in your systems!” the android shot back.  He appraised Fury as he folded himself into a chair at the nearest end of the table.  Ultron barely fit the little seat.

“Now I know for sure,” the director sighed.

The director peeked slyly at Tony, and then the engineer caught him glancing almost imperceptibly at Steve.  Rogers fixed Tony with a steadying look that said, “ _Our turn_.”  That didn’t bode well.  Tony wasn’t sure what they would manage while being surveilled, or _if they even knew_ they were being surveilled, but it wasn’t exactly like the engineer could warn them.  Ultron was right there.  He tucked the thought away for later.

Behind Steve, Bucky’s expression churned with restrained rage.  He obviously had _feelings_ about this – after his decades-long Hydra nightmare – which Tony couldn’t bear to witness.  In fact, everywhere Tony looked, his friends were stock-still and rigid with miserable tension.  Bruce looked a little green as he caught Tony’s attention.  An unbearable weight of guilt festered behind his eyes as he took in the sight of Tony in the collar.  Not anger or bitterness at him, like the engineer had assumed, but culpability.  Tony’s guts did an aching somersault.

One big hand crooked a finger at Tony then and Ultron patted a chair to his left.  The engineer forced himself to walk over.

 “Jesus, Tony, are you alright?”  Pepper, standing off to his left and clenching Rhodey’s hand for support, sounded _destroyed_.

 “Never better,” he bit irreverently, sinking into the chair without making eye contact.  “Look, don’t we have more important issues to address than what a _delicate flower_ I am?  There have to be bigger problems, you know, like the rest of the world.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Rhodey cut in.  “The military, the government, the media… everyone’s in an uproar.”

“The World Security Council has been waiting to conference,” Fury added as he sat at the table, swiping the tabletop to bring the screen to life on the far wall.  Two men and three women – the only familiar face among them the red-headed Councilor Hawley – frowned down at them from the screen, expressions taut with a palpable burden of stress.  Their eyes flicked immediately to Ultron in his central seat, before scanning over the other faces in the room and settling on Tony himself.  They visibly eyed the flash of metal at his throat.

“We spent most of last night in discussion with Director Fury,” Hawley began, solemn and stern, “But we called all of you together because we needed to update everyone on the situation.  We also require _one hell of an explanation_ from Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner.  Possibly other parties, if they are not currently hostile.”  She furrowed her brow at Ultron, who let out a low bray of laughter.

“Not at all, Councilor,” the android put up his hands, “If I were, I wouldn’t be _sitting here_.  Neither would any of you.”

“Councilor Lellouche will first brief you on media coverage before we move on to other matters,” Hawley said curtly, clearly in a leadership role as the most senior member.  “We have quite a lot to discuss.”

A second woman spoke then, smoothly ebony-skinned, her grave face bracketed by a mournfully black scarf, “The events that took place in Sokovia yesterday are being splashed all over the media.”  Her voice had the sibilant lilt of a Francophone accent, overlaying something entirely different.  “The world has seen your surrender, Mr. Stark.”

 _Algerian, probably_ , Tony guessed at the woman’s heritage, as the screen cut to grainy smartphone footage.  It looked passing familiar, before Tony realized that he’d caught a half-glimpse of Ultron watching this shortly before.  Tony saw himself ejected from the suit, kneeling at the AI’s feet.  Watched the android hoist him by the neck.  Observed Ultron rocket into the air, and then came blurry footage of their arrival at the tower in New York.  _Of course Sokovians (and New Yorkers) caught that mess on their cell phones, you can’t fart without making YouTube or fucking Twitter these days,_ Tony thought.

Then, a few images of Ultron and Tony crossed the screen, intercut with quick, shaky snippets of carnage and wreckage in Sokovia.  All the while headlines scrolled along, “’Ultron’s Fatal Rampage In Sokovia; Death Toll Unknown.  Stark And His Killer Robot AWOL.  World Governments Call For Resolution.”  It was overlaid by rapid-fire, sharp-edged comments from reporters and pundits, lamenting the loss of life, speculating on the reason for Ultron’s creation, fear-mongering about the AI’s firepower, and – predictably – casting guilt on Stark himself.  And that wasn’t even touching the social media bloodbath he was likely being dragged through right now.  Tony felt he was probably better off not knowing.

“Christ, I’m an artificial intelligence, _NOT A ROBOT!_ ”  Ultron snarled loudly, scrubbing a hand down his face.  Tony remained silent, his whole body aching with anguish.

Amid the mess, though, there was no mention of military issues.  Not one peep about mobilizing an organized response.  Tony supposed it made sense, because no country would want to broadcast defenselessness to its foes, and because everyone was afraid of Ultron’s might.  Lellouche continued then, “Worldwide governments are panicked, because – as Director Fury warned us last night – while all lines of communication are up, most military infrastructure is inoperable.  In conjunction with us, the UN has agreed to keep this secret from the general public, but we are all vulnerable.” 

 _Called it_ , the engineer thought, feeling the heat of Councilor Lellouche’s glare at Ultron.  The AI smiled in response, calm and sunny _._   “Officials, particularly in Sokovia and her eastern European neighbors, are calling for an explanation from you and the Avengers team.  They want answers, aid, reparations, justice.  A restoration of normality.  Stark, as of right now, many are calling you a criminal, even a terrorist.  The world knows Ultron is your creation, and they are longing to point fingers for this tragedy.”

He felt no surprise, only the deep sense that his hubris had brought everything he deserved down on him: blame, hatred, ignominy, punishment.  “Let them,” he rasped brokenly, “It’s unintentional, but true.”

“Councilor Iyer,” Hawley directed, nodding her head at the third woman.

“I am here to get answers.  You say this calamity was ‘unintentional’.  So, what were your intentions in creating Ultron, Mr. Stark?” came the waspish voice of the third Councilor, an Indian woman draped in white.  Her round face was pinched, her dark brow furrowed with scorn.  She gave off ‘bad cop’ vibes that Tony tried, patently, to ignore.

Tony shifted uncomfortably in his chair anyway, folding his hands on the table and staring at them as he answered.  “Ultron was created to be a peacekeeping initiative to help the Avengers anticipate and respond to threats.  That’s all I ever intended him to be.”

“Project Insight showed us how well that works, but I guess some of us weren’t _paying attention_ ,” Steve butted himself in, glaring pointedly from Tony, to Bruce, to Ultron, and finally back to Hawley, whose mouth tightened perceptibly.

“Christ’s sake, Rogers, I never meant to point a gun at the planet like S.H.I.E.L.D. did!  Ultron was for _OUTSIDE_ threats of a Chitauri-Alien-Invasion nature.  He wasn’t finished when he – he’s grown beyond that in ways I didn’t anticipate,” Tony’s energy ebbed as he spoke, until the last sentence was a low, guilty admission.  He shot a glance at Bruce, who _had_ anticipated it, _had_ warned him, and in that moment, Tony swore he would _never_ ignore the canon of science fiction again.

“I tried to stop him.  Told him it was a bad idea,” the doctor murmured sheepishly, before he worked up the nerve to speak louder.  “But you can’t lay it all on him.  I played a part in this too, and Tony’s goals made sense to me, despite my concerns.  He never intended to create a weapon like Ultron.”

At that, the room erupted in belligerent clamor from all directions – the Council, the team, and S.H.I.E.L.D. all taking sides – before Ultron clanged a fist on the table that startled everyone to muteness.  “Can I just add something here?  I feel like I’m repeating myself, but I’m not pointing a gun at anyone!  I’m running damage control because all you humans do is _murder_ each other.  I’m not a weapon.  Like Stark said, I’m a peacekeeper: I’m _protecting_ you.”

“Not pointing a gun?  What do you call that stunt in Sokovia?  Was that _protecting people_?!” Councilor Iyer was intense and livid, her already pinched face scrunching in on itself in disgust.

“What use was your conversation with Director Fury if you’re asking me all of this again??  It was not done out of hostile intent.  Killing people was not my goal.  It was meant to keep the Avengers busy while I disarmed you and locked the weapons away.”  Ultron’s face wound into a shape of impatient exasperation.  Pinching two fingers together, he added, “And it… may have been a _teensy_ flex of the figurative muscles.  I’ll concede that.”

In the background, one of the male councilors – an older Japanese man in an _extremely decorated_ US Air Force uniform – gave a harsh laugh before interjecting, “Killing some in a show of intimidation, out of desire to ‘save the many’.  Clearly, you’ve been studying your history.”

“Councilor Abe,” Iyer scolded his interruption, before putting her next question to the AI, “And Stark?  You’ve apparently got him on a short leash.  Is that collar also your idea of _protection_?”  She nodded her head at Tony, eyes flicking down at his neck.

_A leash?  Oh Christ, were they listening to that “cone of shame” shit?_

Ultron smiled gently, gave a soft chuff, and said, “You’re a quick study, Councilor Iyer.  Stark’s never really stopped designing weapons, despite his delusions of heroism.  He’s a mass-murderer by proxy, so yes.  Self-preservation aside, getting him under my thumb was for your protection.”  Bruce made a sickened sound that echoed the nausea in Tony’s own gut.

Detached from the conversation, Tony’s ears rang with _mass-murderer.  Mass-murderer.  Mass-murderer._   His heart thudded a sick tattoo against his ribs.

Distantly, he heard Iyer continue: “And you chose not to do the same for Dr. Banner… why?”

Ultron gazed over at Bruce as if considering this, “Banner is a _doctor_ , not a weapons engineer.  And I suspect our green friend would shred anything I devise, anyhow.  Stark was my main concern.”

Iyer’s dark eyes hardened, her tone steely, “He’s the one who knows how to take you out.”  Now, _that_ got through to Tony.

“It was-“ the engineer blurted, but before he could get further, the collar was jerked to Ultron’s hand and two big, sharp fingers were crammed into his mouth, grazing the back of his throat.  He gagged, loud and wet, and tasted blood.  Tears sprang to his eyes and Tony reflexively scrabbled at the machine’s grip.  The entire table jerked with tension, struggling not to lose their collective shit, and failing in various degrees.

“Another word, Stark, and I’ll rip that tongue out by the root.  The silence would actually be a relief,” Ultron held him there, angled gawkily into the machine’s side.  Then, even worse, he dragged Tony into his lap and sat him on a thigh, the cutting edges of metal fingers still prying the engineer’s mouth open for an agonizingly long moment.  His magnetic death-grip on the collar did not falter as he slowly drew the digits out.  The android’s glare dared Tony to speak.  “Even if Stark had destroyed my prime unit, you’d still be _up to your ears_ in copies of me.  Let’s continue, shall we?  What’s the next question?”

Iyer forged onward, “What are your goals and intentions going forward?”

“For the last time,” Ultron griped, “What did Fury even tell you yesterday?  I’m interested in human evolution, in biotech, in designing the next step.  My goals are peaceful, that’s all you need to know.”  His tone was heavy.  Final.

“That is not an answer,” the councilor pressed, narrowing her eyes.  “We want specifics.”

“You’re not really in any position to get that information, are you?  It’s not like you can actually threaten me,” the machine fired back, “I’m pulling the strings here, Madame CIA.  I’ll tell you _what I want_ to tell you.”

Iyer huffed in frustration and opened her mouth as if to say something else.  In an attempt to de-escalate the situation, Hawley cleared her throat and raised her hands.  “Moving on.  Councilor Oliveira, why don’t you take the floor?”

A kindly male voice spoke then, lent warmth by its mild, tumbling Latino cadence, “I would like to refocus our conversation in a more _productive direction_.  Differences aside, it is crucial that we cooperate on humanitarian aid and reparations for this tragedy in Sokovia.”

Tony couldn’t seem to find it in himself, then, to focus.  Instead, head down as much as the collar’s restriction would allow, he flexed his jaw and wiped a hand over stinging split lips.  He wasn’t quite sure how, but things just kept getting worse by the minute.  The shame he’d anticipated didn’t even touch this.  He burned with it, still wracked with the sensation of digits forcing his mouth open wide in front of everyone, making him gag.  He couldn’t even bring himself to look up, so he simply sat dumbly, rasping a dry tongue over the gouges in his mouth and reeling.  Somewhere around him, Oliveira, Fury, and Ultron were calmly hashing out details about the cleanup of Sokovia, Ultron’s sentinels, first responders, S.H.I.E.L.D. rescue teams.

“Do you have anything you would like to add, Mr. Stark?” Oliveira prompted at last, snapping Tony to attention.  Councilor Oliveira seemed calmest of the five, with an earnest smile lighting up his sun-browned face.  His green eyes were lit with concern, and to Tony, something about his gentle manner screamed _doctor_.  “Mr. Stark?”

Since he was rather fond of his tongue, Tony glanced sidelong at Ultron and waited for an urging nod to speak.  “The Stark Relief Foundation,” Tony supplied quietly, training his eyes on the table interface he couldn’t use, “Will gladly provide aid and financial reparations for the disaster.  We can even dip into SI, if the stocks haven’t plummeted too far.”

“I haven’t even brought myself to look at them this morning, Tony,” Pepper groaned, her voice muffled, “It’s probably going to be ugly.”

“My personal funds, then,” the engineer licked his lips and leveled a gaze at the CEO.  Her head was cradled in her hands.  Tony scanned across the table, then, noting that none of the team were looking at him.  They were all downturned eyes, defensively crumpled postures, white-knuckled hand-wringing.  He supposed it was awkward, what with Ultron’s hand gripping stiffly on the collar, forcing Tony upright on his lap like a cruel parody of a ventriloquist’s dummy.  _At least_ , Tony thought grimly, _there isn’t a hand up my ass_.

Again, Hawley ushered the group onward, “Councilor Abe needs to discuss the current military situation before Councilor Lellouche brings the meeting to a close.”  The steely-haired Japanese man straightened himself, tugging the chest of his uniform a bit flatter.  His stiff bearing stood in sharp contrast to the easy, amiable nature of Oliveira.

Tony perked up, forcing down his embarrassment, because this was _too important_ to miss.

“Tell me, Ultron, what you plan to do with all of the military firepower you’ve just hoarded?”  His brow and the creases of his aged face knotted with disdain as he appraised the machine.

“God, that stunt I pulled worked _too_ well,” Ultron laughed, “You all think I’m the apocalypse on legs.  I’m going to sit on the weapons, Councilor, until I encounter a threat to your safety, and then I’m going to use them to eliminate that threat, whatever it may be.  From whichever direction it comes.”  The hand that held Tony’s collar let go then, sliding down to knead his shoulder and resting there.  The touch, frighteningly gentle after the cutting, violent thrust of fingers in his mouth, elicited a shudder from the engineer.  Not because it was gentle, but because it was a quiet threat.  A reminder.

Abe looked pointedly at the hand and at the collar before shifting back to Ultron’s face.  “You’re saying we could be that threat?”

“My directive – my top priority – is to protect humanity.  Anyone or anything that threatens me becomes a threat to all of you.  Stark discovered that the hard way,” the android furrowed his brow and somehow his face looked earnest.  “But I’m not _setting out_ to hurt any of you.”

“I just need to know: what do you expect us to do without the use of our weapons technology, exactly?”  Abe folded his hands in front of him and knocked them on the table, leaning forward with an impatient annoyance.  Ultron laughed.

“Maybe actually _talk to each other_ instead of fighting?  Use diplomacy?  There’s a novel thought for you,” the android mocked.

Abe spluttered at the patronizing tone before he recovered, “And precisely how are we to respond to internal threats of terrorism or violence!?  Political upheaval?”

“It will be a group effort, and we start by cooperating, Councilor.  Your existing systems and your men funnel intel to me and you work together, while I assess threats, push orders to you, S.H.I.E.L.D., and the Avengers, and use heavy artillery as needed.”  As he spoke, Ultron was drawing a diagram in the air above the touch table, explaining his reorganization of things.  “You seem to have the wrong idea about what I’m doing.  I’m not taking any of you out of commission.  I’m turning all these hundreds of little squabbling cliques into one big team.  And I’m the coach, calling the plays.  You bring ideas to me for my approval.  If anyone does something I don’t like, I _bench_ them.  Does that really sound so threatening?”

The room was silent enough to hear a pin drop as everyone absorbed that.

Tony was positively reeling because – at its heart – what Ultron _wanted to do_ wasn’t really all that different from what Tony had _wanted him to do_ , in a perfect world.  And yet, what kind of lengths would Ultron go to for his idea of peace?  Something wrenched in Tony’s gut and he found himself mumbling, “You’re not giving the whole picture here.  You said yourself, you’re interested in control.  What happens to people who rebel?”

“Death,” Ultron remarked blandly.

“You said there’d be no more killing!  How does this make you _any better_ than I was?”  The engineer felt his eyes begin to burn with unshed tears of impotent rage.  His fists balled in his lap.

“Ah, I said ‘ _less violent_ ’, not non-violent, and it will be _controlled_ , Stark, unlike yours.  Only dangerous dissidents and threats will die,” Ultron’s voice bubbled with restrained anger as the hand closed on the back of his collar again.  Tony thought twice about saying more.

“Forced peace isn’t peace,” Steve finally found words, “It’s tyranny.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.  You don’t seem to be doing too well on your own though,” the AI tapped a thoughtful hand to his mouth then offered it forward at Rogers, “So, I’m thinking rigid structure will be good for humanity.  Anyone else have any questions or _meaningful contributions_ on military issues?  Councilor?”

Abe looked ashen, and shook his head.  “I trust you’ll be in contact going forward as we work things through?”

“Don’t you worry, Councilor, I will.  Once we get this media PR mess sorted,” The AI wheeled a hand in the air as he sat back, letting out a mechanical sigh that sounded almost satisfied.

Councilor Lellouche leaned forward again, “Before we wrap this up, I wanted to discuss that matter with you.  Are you planning to publicly address your image and Mr. Stark’s after Sokovia?  If Sokovia’s European allies cannot pull together a force to bring you to trial-“

“They can try, but as I’m sure they’ve all realized by now that they aren’t getting any electronic offensive measures off the ground,” the android purred smugly.

“-they will at the very least need some kind of public statement to accompany your aid.  To address the concerns of the people.  If we don’t there will certainly be unrest, possibly violence.”  Lellouche quashed her perturbation at being interrupted. 

The machine waved a dismissive hand, vaguely agreeing to work on a statement with Stark, before Hawley signed off.  There was chatter among the team, and worried glances the engineer didn’t see.  Distantly, he heard the android yammering at Fury, holding an impatient dialogue with the others, but Tony felt lost in his own head.  He was truly overwhelmed at the whole mess, still pondering the scale of Ultron’s control and influence.

For nothing to have come down on the AI’s head yet, for nobody to have come barreling through their doors… It meant that Ultron had woven a massive serpentine trap of programming through the world’s digital infrastructure, like Stuxnet realized to its full, nightmarish potential.  _That_ monstrous thing was designed to take over the digital systems nobody really thought about – the shit that ran factory production lines and nuclear power plants.  So what was to stop Ultron from modifying that or any other virus he’d found to quietly manipulate anything with programming, a hard drive, and a network connection?  The possibilities were essentially endless.

In the time he sat in horrified contemplation, the AI had ushered the team out of the conference room without Tony’s noticing.  It was only in the abrupt silence that the engineer snapped back to attention, to find himself alone with Ultron.  He was still perched rigidly on the machine’s thigh and the position felt awkward and foolish.  “Welcome back.  We need to have a little chat,” Ultron began crossly.

Tony was hurtling forward through the air before he could answer, or really even process that.

His face hit the table first and stars burst in his vision.  Beneath the echoing slam and his own yowl of pain, Tony heard the jangle of fracturing glass.  He was pinned, face and chest down against the table, his ass canted up over the edge.  A spider web of cracks spiraled outwards from the collar’s point of impact.  The metal jutted up into his throat, choking him just enough to be uncomfortable.  Ultron leaned in, pressing a thigh against his behind and shoving the collar down hard enough for the ring in the front to _grind into the glass_.

Ultron’s free hand shrieked against the flickering surface next to his head as he snarled into the human’s ear, “Did you really think I would let you do sabotage show-and-tell with your friends?”

Without missing a beat, Tony snapped, “Did you really think I would take that _balls_ insult lying dow-“ the implication dawned on him mid-sentence and he stammered to recover, “-that I would put up with it?”

“ _Take it lying down_ , heheh,” the machine laughed darkly, leaning his thigh and hip a bit harder into Tony’s ass.  The engineer edged himself forwards in a vain attempt to escape the press of Ultron’s body, but succeeded only in jamming the hard edge of the table painfully into his hipbones.  Ultron pressed in closer, his mechanical breath tickling the shell of Tony’s ear.  “Freudian slip, Tony?  And I did expect you to _take it_ , yes.  You don’t seem to understand the reality of the situation, so let me make things clear for you.”

A big hand traced down the line of Tony’s back and he barked out a harsh sound of surprise.  Then it was prying at the waist of his pants and the engineer was thrashing and bleating _no_ over and over with a blank, senseless horror.  In his head, Tony cursed every submissive fantasy he’d ever had because this loss of control was stupidly terrifying; no bucking hips, no pleas, no safeword would stop Ultron or save him.  The air was sharply cold across his nether regions, then, contrasted by a light scrape of warm metal.

Ultron was touching his ass.  His bare ass.  “ _I **own** you_ ,” the machine growled over Tony’s gibbering litany of refusal.  “Deny it, say no all you like, it won’t change a thing.”  That petting hand ventured up to Tony’s lower back and then there was _a finger skating down the crack of his ass_.  _Like the big, sharp-edged fingers that had **cut** the inside of his mouth oh Christ._   The engineer yelled and writhed in panic.  Though the android gave a mirthful laugh, Ultron’s finger didn’t press in, it simply slid onwards.  Down and down, until the severe edges of the machine’s hand were cupped threateningly around his balls.  Tony whined unwillingly, feeling himself go crimson with shame.

_This has to be a fucking fetish nightmare oh god please just let me wake up._

“I wasn’t kidding about these.  They may still be attached, but only because they’re mine to play with, just like the rest of you,” Ultron rumbled low, sending gooseflesh up Tony’s neck.  “A perfect little weakness to exploit.”

With a sudden flare of rage, Tony spat a disgusted, “No!”  He struggled pointlessly beneath Ultron’s pinning hand on the collar, intimately understanding trapped animals who gnawed off their own limbs.  The hand holding him down was fixed with a strength he couldn’t hope to match; the collar, absolute in its stricture.  The AI squeezed, then, just enough to give him a jolt of pain, as if in warning.  “Let go of me, you freak!”  Tony snarled, which only earned him a harsher squeeze.  Blackness flashed in his vision and his eyes rolled back involuntarily.

The android rejoined with a deadly calm, “Again, you don’t get to call the shots, Stark.  But you’re a spoiled brat, so I suppose you’ll need a firm hand…”  The grip on his balls opened, mercifully, and there was a long, pregnant silence before Ultron added, strangely breathless, “To beat some sense into you.”

Tony’s startled “What?” was cut off by the first blow across his ass, sharp and sudden, and it broke off into a yelp.  The weight behind Ultron’s hand rammed his hips against the table again and all the breath whooshed out of him in shock.  That would bruise, all around.  The pain barely registered, though, because his mind kept circling the thought that this was _Ultron.  Spanking.  His ass._ In his chest, his heart was drumming out the most frantic rhythm possible.  _God, I would be into this if it were someone else.  This is massively fucked up._

“Who owns you?”  The machine roared.

Tony’s jaw set with a choked, indignant anger and he bit, “Nobody.”  _Certainly not fucking you._   Revulsion mixed with a weird thrill twisted in his throat and he tried to shake off the feeling.

A hail of rapid blows fell on him then, one after another, aim true even with his squirming hips.  The heavy, stinging bite of metal built upon itself with each strike, until it wrenched a hiss from his throat that climbed into a shrill, desperate whine.  The engineer hated every second of it, and hated more that little part of him that liked it.  When Tony had no more breath, Ultron paused.  “Let’s try again: who owns you?”  He punctuated the question with a smack three times as hard and wrenched a yell from the human’s throat.

Ultron waited a moment to see if he would speak, rubbing a profanely gentle hand over Tony’s abused flesh.  It almost burned more than a slap.  He swiped that playful fingertip back up Tony’s crack again and the engineer jerked with an embarrassing squeak.  Tony grit his teeth, dropped his forehead to the tabletop with a resolute _thunk_.  He was positively boiling with humiliation now.  But he was Tony Goddamn Stark and he had survived shrapnel and waterboarding and torture and he wasn’t going to _fucking cave_ to this nonsense.  “Fuck off.”

“Fine, I can be patient if you need it _spelled out_ for you,” Ultron spat.

The android’s next barrage was far from nonsense though.  He was utterly merciless, heaping strikes upon strikes on the same spot.  As he worked Tony over, he breathed into his ear, “The pain stops when you give in, Stark.  And rest assured, you’ll crumble first.  I can – and will – do this _all day_.”  The machine’s voice was weirdly husky with some approximation of arousal, if that was possible – and at this point, Tony had no doubt it was – as Ultron alternated between powerful slaps and fiery caresses.  “I’ll break you.  Make you beg.”

“Sick bastard,” Tony cursed between blows, aiming his self-loathing outwards.  He wanted to sound disgusted but something all too familiar was coiling in Tony’s gut and it came out half-moaned.  The thought of begging – struck him deep and twisted so repulsively, so wonderfully.  The pain was building to a searing peak and Tony had long ceased trying to be silent.  He shouted now with the punishing force of each strike, pushing his pain and bitter arousal into a wordless bellow.  In the space between, he stretched taut in anticipation until the hand crashed down and shook his body.  It all gradually welded together in a haze of torment, and the engineer had no idea how many blows he had endured.  His flesh was throbbing, overwhelmed and practically thrumming with it, silently reverberating with sensation like a plucked string.

And then the feeling transcended pain, morphed into something entirely different.  Blood sang in his ears and though Ultron was saying something, Tony couldn’t distinguish the words.  Couldn’t even hear his own shouts, though his throat was dry and sore.  Each strike seemed to set his flesh alight, stoking a bonfire within him.  He was hot and his body floated loose and his heart was thundering and his mind was blank, blank, blank.  Even his despair was gone.  Somewhere outside, Ultron growled again, and the hand stopped falling.  In the dull stillness, the engineer trembled, panting out a desperate rhythm of pain.  A heavy clatter startled him from his trance then: Ultron’s hands scraped the table on either side of his head as the machine pinned him down to purr, “I said, ‘you’re hard, Stark’, soooo… wasn’t calling me ‘sick’ the pot and the kettle?”

Tony’s stomach plummeted when he came to and felt the heavy ache between his legs.  He dropped his head wordlessly to the table again, to hide the threat of tears in his eyes.  The shame of knowing he couldn’t hide his body’s betrayal stung worse than any slap.  He wanted to be nasty, to snap at the machine and insist he was wrong.  But he couldn’t make himself, because if he opened his mouth he would certainly beg for more.  A hand reached down to cup his ass cheek, then squeezed the bruising flesh with a vicelike grip.  Tony writhed, and not entirely in pain, which he was sure Ultron knew.

“I’m _beating you_ and you’re _getting off on it_.  Looks like I’ve found myself a little masochist plaything, haven’t I?”  He chuckled, sounding positively triumphant.

“It’s a fear boner,” Tony retorted thickly, even though he knew it was really only a half-truth.  _Fear AND pain_.

“Even better,” the machine rumbled in utter delight.  “Oh, you’re going to be _so much fun_!”

When a hand reached beneath the table and closed on his manhood, Tony spilled over with hot, fat tears.  Ultron’s hand was sharp and cruel as he dragged and scraped about, examining the contours of the engineer’s cock.  Ultron wallowed in the sadistic glow of Tony’s terrified pleading, before he felt satisfied that the human was sufficiently undone to give in.  He gave one last squeeze and whispered, “Ready to answer my question, Stark?”

A shaking, wet sound rattled out of Tony then, “You.”

Yanking him abruptly upright by the hair so he winced, Ultron barked, “Pull yourself together.”  Tony only had time to hastily drag his pants up over his raw, aching ass before the AI commanded him down, folding him to his knees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, yeah that's a mean cliffhanger.
> 
> Here are my WSC guys:
> 
> •Councilor Lellouche – Algerian – muslim diplomat of sub-saharan and French descent, speaks French and a passel of other languages. Liaison to UN. Media/PR arm.  
> •Councilor Iyer – Indian – genius psychologist who moved to the US to work for CIA. Liaison to S.H.I.E.L.D. Intel arm.  
> •Councilor Oliveira – Brazilian – a medical doctor with ties to Red Cross, World Health Organization, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). Humanitarian Aid arm.  
> •Councilor Abe – Japanese, raised in US – high level Air Force officer. Liaison to NATO. Military arm.
> 
> Writing a conversation with approximately 20 people in the room to account for was giving me literal fits, but hopefully I did okay. As always, let me know how I'm doing.


	6. Chapter 6

Tony huddled there on hands and knees for some immeasurable time before he could manage a coherent thought.  Overwhelmed with horror, his body quaked, ears rung, head spun, heart raced.  The past twenty four hours had been a blur of casual violence at Ultron’s hand, and the _something else_ bubbling just beneath the surface had finally become clear to him. The hands – claiming and invading every intimate, vulnerable part of his body, holding him forcibly on the machine’s lap – made it clear that Ultron wanted to humiliate him.  He shuddered and tears streamed cool, again, along his burning cheeks.

There had been something distinctly _predatory_ about Ultron from the moment he’d stepped out of the lab – a sinuous, coiled power lurking beneath the surface.  And in spite of that, Tony had never expected things to quite go in this direction with an artificial being.  _Grabbing his neck?  Stuffing his mouth?  Spanking his ass?  Squeezing his… ugh Christ_ , he had to stop thinking about it.  How could an artificial intelligence – who lacked hormones, visible genitalia, or even a concrete experience of sensuality to drive it – be so deliberately _sexual_?  How could Ultron _even have a sex drive_ with no biology, no reproduction to fuel it?  It was irrational.  Pointless.  Strange.

A chair scraped across the floor and thunked down in front of him.  The engineer couldn’t make himself look up, not even when he heard the whir and clank of the AI sitting down to consider him.  “While I enjoy the sight of you on all fours,” Ultron mused at last, “You’re going to sit up for me.  On your knees.”

The words hit him right in the bowl of his pelvis, and the fact that his erection hadn’t flagged, made Tony ache with disgrace.  He swallowed hard and pushed himself back.  When his ass sank back against his heels, he wheezed out a jagged breath at the stab of pain.  He’d been spanked before, but being hit by Ultron’s heavy hand was like being _clubbed_.  The bruises would be dark and hideous.

Once the human was upright, Ultron urged softly, “Goooood, that’s good.  Now _look_ at me.”

The engineer’s eyes felt glued to the floor, as if a heavy weight were pressing him down and down and down.  With great difficulty, he lifted his gaze to the machine’s feet, spread in a wide, imperious V, but found he could go no further.  _Why is it so hard?_ He felt himself blinking rapidly with the effort, and his own weakness filled him with resentment.  _No, dammit, fuck him, I’m not letting him get to me like this._   With an angry huff, he lifted his head and forced himself to gaze Ultron in the face, eyes hard.

Those crimson lights blazed into him like a brand, pleasure sparkling and deep.  A languorous little grin tilted the machine’s mouth and angled his brow.  “I’m not sure which I enjoy more, your little struggle to make eye contact, or the fact that you’re glaring daggers at me.  Tell me, do you feel humiliated, kneeling there with tears on your face and welts on your ass?  Terrified by your own powerlessness?”  Ultron’s eyes dragged downward over his kneeling form.

Tony felt his jaw muscles jump and clench.  Ultron had hit the nail on the head.  Tony was laid bare in all senses before his captor; ripped from his armor.  The swell of comprehension was bitter.  The engineer angled his fuming gaze at the floor and said nothing.  His damn eyes could stop leaking any day now.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ultron leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees to bring his face closer to Tony.  “Psychologists say anger masks shame, which itself masks the vulnerability of fear.  _Fascinating_ , really.”  He reached out and hooked a finger in the loop of the human’s collar, forced him to hobble forwards so he knelt within the span of Ultron’s legs.  The hand then yanked at it again, pressing the metal edge into his chin, craning his neck up to lock eyes.  He was so close that Ultron’s breath practically warmed his face.

 _He’s reading my microexpressions,_ Tony realized with a nasty shock, then tried desperately to school his countenance so it was flat.   Watching the slow smile spread across the AI’s face made his guts squirm with dread.  He knew he wasn’t hiding it, knew Ultron knew.   And Ultron’s transparent cockiness about the whole thing only served to make him angrier.

“They’re right, judging from your reactions.  You don’t know _what_ I’m going to do to you, and that terrifies you.  So, you shield that fear with anger, because it makes you feel safe.  As much as his ridiculous Frisbee makes Captain Rogers feel safe.  As much as your suits made you feel safe.”  He barked a laugh; they both knew how preposterous _that_ was.

Tony felt his gut twist.  This depth of complex understanding in an AI was _frightening_.  Not only was Ultron creative and tactically adept enough to deceive _everyone_ , his facile grasp of emotion far surpassed all prior examples of machine learning.  It struck Tony then how profoundly he’d fucked up: fusing powerful alien programming – from a _mind control_ staff, no less – with the greatest hits of humanity’s deep learning algorithms.  Given access to the entire sum of human knowledge via the internet, Ultron’s jump from pattern recognition and natural language processing to complex analysis of intention, motivation, and even sentiment had been worryingly rapid.  Far, _far_ too human.  But again, the organic behavior of the programming was what had caught Tony’s eye in the first place.

Tony had a sudden crash of understanding, then.   He had once heard someone describe the human brain as “the largest sex organ”, and Ultron was… definitely well-endowed in that regard.  So it made sense that – even with no urge for procreation or sense of physical pleasure – Ultron took _his_ in controlling and manipulating others.  _It was a power trip_.  Then, breaking out in a sweat, the engineer began to grasp the awful potential of Ultron’s goals. 

 _Sensation_.  He couldn’t feel pleasure…

**_Yet_.  **

**_NOPE_** _that’s nightmare territory._   Tony felt himself squirm; staunched the rising urge to shriek.  _It couldn’t be.  It couldn’t._   “Is there a point to all of this, besides humiliating me?”  The engineer spat, desperately trying to think about literally anything else, snapping his gaze away to glare a hole through the floor again.

 “I was getting to that,” Ultron chided.  He lifted the human’s chin again to judge him.  “Two points: punishment and establishing ground rules,” The AI counted off, his metal fingers whirring just to the right of Tony’s temple.

“Obey you and shit, that much is obvious,” Tony bit impatiently, desperately wishing the endless eye contact would stop.  He figured it wasn’t possible, but under the scrutiny it felt like his mind was being read.  He was caught in a horrifying mental spiral of hands on his body.  Of Ultron’s words.  _Mine to play with_.  _I can do what I want with you._   _If that’s how you want it to be…_   “Get on with it,” Tony groused.

Ultron closed a peeved fist in his hair.  The exposed metal joints seized and wrenched painfully at Tony’s scalp, making him hiss and push his head up for relief.   “That stunt in the meeting proved to me that you didn’t understand.  You needed a _lesson_ ,” the android chastised, “The next time you play games, it will be much more than a spanking, Stark.  Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal,” Tony grunted miserably. 

“And what happened today could have been much, much worse.  I could have thrashed your ass in front of everyone.”

Tony gasped raggedly at the thought and the appalling bolt of desire that it shot between his legs.  When his head was abruptly released, he sighed and sagged downwards in respite.

Ultron looked down at the engineer, amusement flashing in his eyes as he chuckled, “Though from the sound of _that_ , you might have actually liked it.  Interesting...” 

The human shrunk in on himself, utterly baking with embarrassment and whining out a low, “Ohhhh God….” Between the hands shielding his face.  Ultron laughed harder, then ruffled the hair on the back of his head.

“Let’s talk about expectations.  As you so eloquently put it, I do expect you to ‘obey me and shit’ _.  In all matters_.”

“A-all?  That’s pretty goddamn… broad…” Tony shot up beneath the touch, cringing at the look in the machine’s eyes, at the heat of his own face, at how obvious he sounded in his shock.  _No shit, Sherlock, he’s got a collar on you…_

“That’s the idea.  In return, you can expect your needs to be met, free range of the living space, and any _rewards_ I deign to give you.  If you disobey, you can expect punishment.  And I will be quite inventive.”  The machine smiled with sickening satisfaction, and Tony couldn’t help but gag at the insinuations between his words.  From the locked doors, he’d already surmised he wasn’t going outside anytime soon, but his basic needs and freedom of movement were also contingent on _compliance_ , if he was hearing things correctly.  Tony prayed he was wrong.

“Forced labor?  House arrest?  Been there, done that,” The human sneered and squeezed out a sarcastic laugh to mask his malaise.  “I’ve got this.”

“Talk is cheap; prove it to me.”  Ultron grinned, distinctly mischievous.  Tony stared, perplexed, at the AI before Ultron continued, “Come closer.  Lay your head in my lap.”

Tony goggled, not believing his ears.  _What the fuck is happening._   He hung in suspended animation, his heart racing.  “You’re kidding,” Tony hissed at last, when he could speak.

Ultron flexed a casually threatening fist where it was draped at the end of the armrest, examining his knuckles while droning blithely, “I figured you’d be stubborn, but I can fix that.  Spread you out on that table again until you’re feeling good and docile.”  The AI’s smile was smug and distant.

Tony’s eyes flicked to the elevator in an instinctual urge to escape, before he remembered that the doors wouldn’t open to him anymore.  The house was Ultron’s.  His mind then puzzled over the team downstairs: had they heard the clamor?  Would they try coming to his aid?  _No_ , he realized, _Ultron promised he’d kill those who fight back.  They wouldn’t be that brash._ He sighed.  _Nowhere to go and nobody to save my ass.  I’m got.  I either roll over and sit pretty or get beaten into it._ The idea thrilled him with the least appropriate wave of excitement ever. 

_God, why?  This is **not** the time.  Why do I have to be this way?_

Blinking erratically in muddled fear and arousal, he skittered forwards and leaned his head down against one great metal thigh.  He pinched his eyes shut, on edge and unable to keep from trembling.  Something hard cradled the back of his head, and edged fingertips grazed his scalp almost gingerly.  “Perfect,” Ultron purred in pleasure.  “See?  It doesn’t _need_ to hurt, Stark, not if you’re _a good boy_ for me.”

Helpless to stop it, something unclenched in Tony and everything went fuzzy around the edges.  In the overwhelming swell of powerlessness, those two little words were like a vicious smack **_downwards_** and he was sinking into it, limp and lax and pliable.  Everything slowed and fell away, leaving the warm, unyielding expanse of vibranium against his cheek, the heft of fingers petting the back of his neck, and the deep thunder of the machine’s voice.  A weightless passivity enveloped him, and he drifted on the current.  Ultron was telling him things, then, in words his floating mind couldn’t seem to grasp.  Asking him questions.  The engineer was so loose and low and easy, that he barely registered the drone of his own answering voice, or the feel of slow assenting words in his mouth.

* * *

The elevator ride back down to the communal floor was not only stupidly cramped, but also sharp with unvoiced emotion.  Nobody spoke.  Not a word.  Without looking up, Bucky could feel the shifting, tense nudging of fourteen other bowed pairs of shoulders.  The air hung thick with misery.  He clung to Steve’s left hand with his right, squeezing and feeling a comforting press in return.  The blond seemed to know that Ultron’s _handling_ of his friend made Bucky uneasy for a number of reasons.  That he was reeling.  Taking it hard.

Echoing through the doors, there was a loud bang, a splintering crack, and a frightened, Stark-like shout.  “Oh no.  Oh God, Tony, “ Pepper mourned.  When Bucky dared a glance, he saw she had folded herself tautly against Bruce, vibrating and sparking as if suppressing her fire, and Rhodey was bracketing her shoulders with his equally unsteady hands.  Everyone looked up, faces scrunching with revulsion.  It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on up there, especially not after the awkward show Ultron had put on during the meeting.

Bucky tried, and failed, not to think of all the Hydra handlers who’d crushed him into compliance, who’d forged him into a thing to be used.  Old things he’d forgotten were spilling back now.  The sound of his own screaming.  Nausea gripped him.

“We can’t just let him hurt-“  Steve started, shaking with bitten-off rage, but before he could finish his sentence, Fury was harshly jabbing at the emergency stop as if his life depended on it.  At the conference room button, at all of the buttons… to no avail.

The two shared a resigned glance before Fury closed his eyes and hissed, “Should have figured the tower was compromised.”

After a moment, a series of dull thuds reverberated down the elevator shaft, punctuated here and there by the odd bray of pain.  Each blow, each cry sent a nervous jolt through the team.  Fury, although not jerking like the others, looked ashen.  Quietly horrified.   Even Natasha and Clint, hardened as they seemed, were holding each other’s steely gaze like a lifeline.

Everyone was silent as the sound fell away, except for Thor, who finally exploded with an angry roar that made the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents all jump.  “I won’t stand for this!  What stops us from forcing our way up there and tearing that metal bastard apart?  Pepper?  Banner?”

Pepper’s skin had taken on that dangerous magma cast and she growled, “Vibranium _has_ to melt.  Just get me up there, Bruce.”  Rhodey nodded vehemently.

Bruce chimed in with an unsettling, green-eyed calm, “Between you and Hulk and Thor, we could scrap him-”

“Not the smartest course of action, Doctor Banner,” Ultron rattled through the overhead speaker, his serenely menacing tone halting them in their tracks, “I have my hands on Stark right now.  _The only person who poses any real danger to me, and I could mash him into **paste**_ **.**   I’d rather not, because he’s quite useful.  Not irreplaceable though.”  After a beat, he added haughtily, “To me.”

_That’s how he’ll keep us in line.  Tony._

“Aaaaand we’re staying _right where we are,_ ” Rhodey raised his hands to calm the trio, his voice cracking with nerves.  “Don’t even think about it,” he admonished Thor, Bruce, and Pepper, and in any other situation, his ‘fight-me’ glare at the team’s heavy hitters might have been funny.  But Bucky understood, Rhodes was like Steve: he didn’t care if he was outmatched, he would fist-fight the _entire planet_ for his loved ones.

 “What about the compound?  We need to regroup-” Sam mouthed, silent and stiff to Bucky’s right, eyes snapping from Fury to Pepper.

“Same network,” Pepper hissed disgustedly, shaking her head.  Everyone eyed each other knowingly, wordlessly, before a deliberate, slow clap resounded in the space.

“Took you long enough to put _that_ together,” the android sneered.  “When I said I was everywhere, _I meant it_.  All of your hidey holes and tech are _crawling with me_.  All of it’s _mine_.  I’m running the show and as Stark discovered-”  He broke off to pipe in an agonized sound somewhere between a scream and a sob, “My bullshit tolerance is zero.  No games.”

 “Roger that, _Boss_ ,” Fury gritted out, irreverent anger cutting through the hush.

“Good,” Ultron chirped.  “And just so you know, Stark is contrite but very much okay.”  A screen in the far wall flickered to life with security footage.  An ugly sound clawed its way out of Bucky’s throat at the sight.  Tony was kneeling, head down, between the legs of his creation.  Ultron had a hand braced on the human’s head…  Several of the team wailed and retched in disgust before it became clear that Tony’s head was calmly pressed to the android’s thigh and not doing _something else_.  Still except for trembling breaths, Tony was roughed up – his clothing askew, his face ruddy – but otherwise hauntingly gentled beneath the machine’s stroking hand on his hair.  Ultron spoke above them, “Let’s keep him that way, shall we?”

Across from him Barton snarled, “TURN IT OFF!” with a vitriol that could only be some kind of self-loathing.  Several fists were all through the screen, shaking the elevator in its tracks, even before Ultron started to laugh.  Steve turned to him, then, and fixed Bucky in a clinging hug that meant Steve felt just as helpless as he did.  Just more quietly.

When they finally got to the communal floor, the group toddled out of the elevator in a daze.  Bucky would have said he was relieved to be out of there, but things really weren’t looking any better down here.  Numberless sentinels practically filled the space, scuttling back and forth with huge chunks of machinery and all sorts of odds and ends.

“Well, he certainly wasn’t kidding,” Natasha deadpanned, watching the flow of metal bodies and outsize machine parts.  “Is he bringing his _whole goddamn lab_ from Sokovia?”

 _Nat would know, she saw the inside of it_ , Bucky thought.

“Observant, Ms. Romanov!” A sentinel said with Ultron’s sarcastic cheer as he tottered past with a bundle of wiring.

Steve’s shoulder nudged Bucky’s, and the super soldiers followed the stream of robots with their eyes out to the landing pad, out to the sky beyond, where more were still arriving.  “Christ,” the blond muttered, pressing the heel of his hand to his brow.  “This is ridiculous.”

“Where the fuck we gonna sleep?”  Sam added in confusion.

Barton groused overloud, “Do we still live here?”  Then he grumbled something under his breath that Bucky thought contained the word _farm_.

Another machine turned its blue eyes on the archer and gave a little nod, “Oh sure, it’s not _your_ rooms I’m worried about.  Most of me will stay in the legion maintenance bay.”

Bruce, absently watching the bustle of machines at the opposite end of the space, abruptly tottered over with a hand outstretched at them, “Hey, wait a minute that’s _my lab_!  You’re-!  My...”  He frowned as a few chuckling robots bumped and skirted around him with armloads of shoes.  “Shoes-?  What the-”

“…Tony’s shoes!”  Pepper announced with consternation, sidestepping more robots.  She’d recognize that hoard of loudly-colored sneakers anywhere.  And then, “Tony’s tools?”  The engineer’s metalworking equipment was being hoisted over their heads by still more drones.

Taking Tony’s stuff.  Of course.

“Like I said, not _your_ rooms,” another sentinel chimed in.  “The lab was an unfortunate necessity, Banner.  I’ll fix you up.  Give me a week or two.  I’d give you Tony’s, but he’ll be using it.”

Bruce opened and closed his mouth a few times ineffectually.

“Welp, _this_ is certainly fuckin’ nuts,” Fury threw his hands in the air and ducked between the queueing robots towards the landing pad.  “I’m stepping out of this swirling vortex of crazy for today.  I need some air.  I’ll be back at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ trying to sort my shit out if you need me.”  He shot the team the most frazzled look that had ever appeared on his stony face, and slunk out the door with his agents in tow.

Thor said nothing, but trod slowly and moodily in the direction of the nearest couch.  An unfortunate sentinel – who darted in his path – promptly ate Mjolnir and went hurtling straight out the nearest window.  Clint couldn’t contain a little snicker.  “Keep that to a minimum if you want Stark in one piece, okay Conan?”  Another machine urged from a safe distance.

Again, Thor made no comment, only sunk into the cushions with his great blonde head in his hands and thudded his hammer down on the table to his right.  And there he sat, a fixed point in all the chaos.  After a long, long moment, he rumbled, “Rest and nourish yourselves, friends.  I cannot until I know Stark is safe.  I will wait.”

Pepper swallowed a choked sound, and Bruce found her shoulder with a reassuring hand.  They both looked brittle with rage, anguish, confusion.

Bucky watched as the others – shell-shocked – heads hanging with exhaustion, trailed off one by one.  Steve stood tense and unmoving at his side, and when he shot the captain a glance, neither of them needed words.  They strode over and plunked down beside Thor in solidarity.  The Asgardian remained quiet, aside from a tiny relieved breath.

So they waited.

* * *

 

Tony rose to awareness at the yank on his collar.  Ultron’s grip was urging him upwards, and his knees practically screamed in torment.  How long had he been kneeling??  The effort of standing was shooting sharp pain through his ass and hips and back and he squeaked out an undignified sound as he struggled to get his feet under him.

“Upsy-daisy.  _There_ we go,” Ultron cooed, and Tony could hear the arrogant grin in his voice.  When he was upright, his stomach growled, hilariously loud in the stillness, and Tony realized that he hadn’t eaten in two-ish days.  Since before Sokovia.  And honestly, he was rather bad about eating regularly, and the utter chaos since the battle had him out of his element.  But now?  God, he was _ravenous_. 

The machine laughed aloud at the sound.  “Hmm, that’s right, you need food,” Ultron said, as if it had just occurred to him. “That sort of thing does tend to slip my mind.  I do apologize.”  Tony knew, by his mocking tone, that it was **_no_** slip.  Metal knuckles pressed tightly into the back of Tony’s neck as Ultron gripped the collar.  “You did well, you deserve a meal before we get to work,” he praised, pushing the human forwards.

“Did _what_?”  Tony queried, stubbornly halting against the android’s forced march and nearly falling.  He knew they’d talked, but in that haze hadn’t been sure what about.

“The statement,” the machine bit impatiently, as if were obvious.  He gave the collar another jerk onwards, making Tony stumble. “I told you what to say, and you repeated it like a well-behaved little parrot.  The recording’s on its way to the Security Council now.”

The engineer’s heart skipped a beat in his chest.  What had he even said?  He couldn’t remember.  How could he be so spaced out he didn’t remember an entire conversation??  “What did I say?”  He wracked his brain but it was all a weird fog.

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll see it on the news soon enough.”  He sounded so damn _satisfied_.

“ _See_ it??”  The air left his lungs in a huge whoosh, leaving him abruptly lightheaded.  There was _footage_?  Of him kneeling and wet-faced and- _fuck_.  It had been hard enough for the World Security Council and the team to see him like this… and now _the whole world_ -?  His knees nearly buckled and his vision swam as they stepped into the elevator, the only thing that kept him aloft was the AI’s hold on the collar.

“Oh yes.  Steady now.”  Ultron rumbled gently as the doors closed behind them.  He turned Tony then, to point him at the far wall, at a smashed comm screen.  The android leaned over to murmur in his ear, “Remember how I said to get used to people seeing?  Well, your friends weren’t so happy about the show.  But we’re just dipping our toes in the water.”

 _Show?  What- oh **God**.  _ Tony whined at the realization, his guts wrenching.  _They watched._   How much, he didn’t know, but the thought alone – the possibility of what they could have seen – was enough to make him burn and sway weakly on his feet.  He grabbed at Ultron’s wrist for a semblance of balance because it was all he had.  Everything was receding again.  Sinking and whirling.

Distantly, he heard Ultron growl with pleasure, “Ohhh look at you, you’re practically destroyed.  Everything stripped away.  Crying and low and a _complete mess_.”  Fingers scraped through the tears on his cheeks. “I’ve half a mind to keep you like this, Stark.”

Tony closed his eyes, blocking out the red glare of Ultron’s gaze, and swallowed slowly and deliberately.  The roiling hunger in his belly brought him back again, and he remembered that he was getting food.  His body came back to him gradually then, as he thought about the crux of trouble they were in, about the looming danger, the loss, the wreckage.  The puzzle of his freedom – that was it!  It pushed the humiliation from his mind.  There had to be a way to outsmart Ultron.  Tony just had to bide his time and work carefully and he’d find it.  All the precaution Ultron was taking with him had to mean it wasn’t out of his reach… hell, Ultron had even _said_ he was dangerous.

By the time the elevator had reached the communal floor, Tony had collected himself, dried his face, pulled back from Ultron’s hand.  Had smoothed his clothes, crossed his arms, and stood next to the machine with a measure of calm that he only found in planning.  Then, of course, the doors opened, and all of that went to shit.

Thor, Steve, and Bucky all charged the elevator the moment they stepped out, converging on Tony like sharks.  They were all frantically babbling over one another and Ultron.  Tony couldn’t even comprehend the words because _they saw._   They knew what happened.  Knew he was hurt and _did they see him beating me god I can never look them in the eye again.  Let me die._   Embarrassment overtook him and he ducked his small stature between Steve and Thor.  Then, Tony scrabbled back upright and was booking it as fast as his injuries would let him, when a metal hand on his shoulder made him yelp and freeze.

From the soft red shirt his downcast eyes fell upon, Tony could tell it was _Bucky_ , not Ultron.  _Bucky’s_ breath shaking with guilt.  _Bucky’s_ voice croaking out, “God, Tony, are you okay?”  Now he _really_ couldn’t look up because his friend sounded _wrecked_.  Behind them, Steve and Thor were having a heated discussion with Ultron, by the sound of it.

But Tony couldn’t say much.  He just sucked in a few slow breaths, before he dropped his head down lower and mumbled, “Work t’do.  I’ll manage.” Ultron boomed intentionally over Steve, who sounded on the verge of explosion, “I was just about to get your friend some food, since he hasn’t eaten in an _absurdly_ long time.  I told you he was in one piece.  If you would just let me-“ 

Meanwhile, a few sentinels were skittering out of the kitchen with plates in tow.  The android stepped past the pair of red-faced avengers and sunk back into the couch where Thor had been a few moments prior.  The food was placed on the table to his right.  Everyone seemed to pause and watch, unsure of what was going on.

He beckoned Tony over then, with a flick of the fingers, “Come here, Stark.” 

Something nasty crawled in Tony’s skin.  _There were no utensils._   It caught him so off-guard, he could only stand there and blink.  Ultron studied his confusion for a beat before sitting back, spreading his arms across the back of the couch, and clarifying, “I’m going to feed you.”

“The- There’s no way-“ Tony spluttered, starting to burn with renewed humiliation.  The machine looked at Tony flatly, as if he were stupid.

“This is how it works, “ the AI said slowly, “You eat from my hand _or you don’t eat at all_.”  His shoulders rose in a shrug.  “Be obstinate all you like; you’ll get hungry enough eventually.” Tony was still then, knowing the android’s denial of food – like everything else – was a calculated ploy for obedience.

_This is all one big joke and I’m the butt monkey. **Literally** eating out of the palm of his hand: that’s where he wants me._

“Come on now, this is excessive!  Can’t you lay off?”  Steve barked, his body tightening with agitation.

“I’ve barely gotten _started_ , Captain,” Ultron grinned, then clicked his fingers in Tony’s direction and pointed at the floor between his feet.   Tony dragged in a few trembling lungfuls of air, glancing between his friends and gauging his hunger against his last shreds of dignity.  He couldn’t – they were still here watching.  Bucky was shifting uncomfortably on his feet, unsettled in a way that made Tony _hurt_.  Steve vibrated with a restless, caged-up frustration.  And Thor?  The Asgardian seemed to instinctively know what was running through his mind.

Thor’s sidelong gaze at Tony looked utterly broken as he put a hand on Steve’s arm and murmured, “We cannot do aught.  Perhaps we should leave them be?”  It was a long moment before they reluctantly left.  The pity in their eyes sickened him.

When they were gone, the engineer took one shy step forward and halted.  _He wanted to say no._   Then a second.  _He wanted to tell Ultron to go fuck himself._   And a third, until he was standing in the span of Ultron’s lap, dreading what was coming next.  _His ego would honestly rather starve, but he couldn’t summon up the willpower._   Jerky with embarrassment, he braced his hands on the machine’s thighs and sank to his knees.  His eyes were practically welded to the floor.  _Here he was again._

“There we go,” Ultron cooed.  He nudged the human closer with a hand on his head. “Did that really need to be so hard?”

Tony choked out either a bitter laugh or a sob, he wasn’t sure which.  “Do you really need to micromanage me like this?  Isn’t this a colossal waste of your time?”

Ultron hummed in delight, “Not when there are so many of me.  I’m patient, and you’re scared of _this one_.”  One hand  touched his own chest, before reaching for the plate.  

Tony understood immediately.  _This one, this body; the indestructible one.  The huge, powerful, glowing red nightmare._ Tony shuddered, hating that the machine saw through him.  “I think we’ve established that,” Tony hissed through gritted teeth.

“Oh yes, but it really is _fun_ to watch you squirm,” The AI beamed, chuffed.  “Barnes’ hand _undid_ you.  You thought it was me.”

The hand returned with a little slice of what smelled like sausage?  Tony stared stiffly at it, until fingertips at his jaw pressed him forwards.  The engineer snagged it with his teeth, then, doing everything humanly possible to avoid touching his mouth to the machine’s fingers.  He turned his face aside to chew and swallow, feeling awkwardly scrutinized.  Dissected.

“And it's even better when you give in,” Ultron skated a gentle touch over his hair.  He brought down another little bite of food and murmured, “Open.”  Tony went to nip it with his teeth again, only to have it pulled back.  The free hand lifted his chin, then, and when Ultron met his eye with a stern look, Tony teetered on the edge of that abyss.  Pulling, shifting, sinking again; feeling like he’d never left.  From the elevator.  From upstairs.  He blinked furiously, frantically pushing the feeling back. 

_God, I can’t lose myself like this.  Can’t let him distract me.  Need to focus on escape, need to-_

“I said **_open_** ,” Ultron snapped, his sharp, commanding tone and the grip on Tony’s chin _doing things_ to the engineer in spite of his determination.  “ ** _Open up for me_** ,” he growled, and the implication was so raw and vulnerable and _sexual_ that Tony felt himself absolutely plummet.

He opened his jaw.  The android set the food delicately on this tongue – a syrupy sweet piece of pancake – then held his head while he ate so he couldn’t turn away.  The simple pleasure of the food was magnified by his exhaustion, the satisfaction of fullness by denial and hardship.  Unthinking, he whimpered soft sounds of appreciation because he couldn’t _remember_ the last time food tasted this good and his stomach _ached_ with hunger.  He was caught, then, in the aura of secondhand pleasure in Ultron’s eyes.  The AI was basking in his enjoyment of the food, almost as if he were living through him.  _Studying it_ with unbroken eye contact.  It wasn’t long before the rhythm and ritual of Ultron’s hands feeding him lulled Tony again, his mind buzzing with static at the thought of being

_Dependent._

_On him._

_For **everything**._

At a murmured command, Tony bowed his head to lick sticky metal fingers clean - dragging his tongue gingerly over sharp edges.  Those fingers were the entire world.

“Feel better?”  The machine’s voice, strangely soft, brought him back up by fractions then.  “Need more?”

Tony breathed a tiny ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in turn, and the air in his lungs was so _heavy._  Distantly, he knew this - this degradation - should bother him, but he couldn’t quite grasp it.  The further the submission took him, the oilier his thoughts became, slithering just out of reach.  Rebellion.  Anger.  Everything.  There would be plenty of time for regret, for the sting of shame, later in the lab when he was alone.  For now, he was just _gone,_ placid in the android’s thrall, and he allowed himself to be urged to his feet and ushered back to the lab. 

It was time for work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally back, after a four month hiatus. I am SO sorry guys. April and May were con prep (I attended Philadelphia Wizard World Comic Con dressed as Tony Stark (you can find photos and cosplay-related stuff at http://tinystarkcosplay.tumblr.com/ ). I spent June sick as a dog with con crud + writer's block from hell. As always, I am glad for any feedback... and hopefully as you can see in this chapter I do *indeed* take suggestions. :)
> 
> Ultron and squirmy, subby Tony are so much damn fun to write!
> 
> I'll try to update again as soon as possible.


	7. Chapter 7

Away from the lounge and Ultron’s spectacle, Thor and Steve shared deeply troubled looks.  “What do we do?  Where do we even _start_?”  Bucky felt himself ask shakily.  His whole body was trembling, eyes frighteningly dark and distant in a way that Steve recognized immediately.  The two blonds both put a steadying grip on his shoulders.

“Buck-“ Steve started, sliding the hand up to cup Bucky’s cheek. “Come back to me.  You’re in Stark Tower, it’s 2017.  Hydra is dead.  Things seem bad, but we’re all together.  We’ll figure things out.”  His voice was rusty, broken with emotion as he looked into Bucky’s eyes because as positive as he tried to be, Steve wasn’t sure _he even believed it._   For all their superhuman strength, Ultron had them-

“ _Trapped_ -“ Bucky wheezed, echoing Steve’s thoughts and curling his arms around himself, “Tony’s _trapped_ and we can’t-“  Steve pulled the panicked man against himself, cutting off his words in a tight hug.  The brunet was rapidly, sharply panting for breath, shutting down and shrinking inwards.

Bucky’s terror was needling at Steve.  He felt equally frightened, and it was becoming harder and harder to hide it.  “Come on, slow, deep breaths.  We’ll make it through.  We’ll help Tony in any way we can, won’t we?”  Steve cajoled, trying to suppress his own anxiety for Bucky’s sake.  The other half of his heart looked up at him, broken and lost in a fog.  His brow was furrowed with effort as he took huge, slow breaths.

“Steven, James, listen, we should rest,” Thor said gently, interrupting.  “We have been drudging on since the battle on mere scraps.  Sleep.  Stark is in one piece for now.  We can discuss matters later.”

Steve nodded grimly, looking at the floor.  “This is completely _fucked_ ,” He whispered helplessly before he met Thor’s eye in acknowledgment.  “Will you tell the others?  I can’t leave Buck alone when he’s like this.”

“Of course, Steven,” Thor replied, “And thank you both for accompanying me.”

“That’s what friends do.  Meeting over… dinner?  Six hours?”  As they hadn’t _really_ slept since Sokovia, Steve’s internal clock was screwed up to say the least.  And after the ordeals they’d been through, they all _deserved_ a full sleep, although they shouldn’t dawdle _too much_.  They had to _fix_ this, even though Steve hadn’t the first idea how.

“Oh, dinner!” The AI’s voice cut in, purring mockingly over a nearby speaker.  “That sounds great!  I’ll cook and we can have a little quality _family time_ together.  Discuss our plans.  Maybe _watch a little tv_.”

The three of them jolted at the intrusion. Thor scoffed angrily, but managed to bite his tongue.  A muscle in his jaw jumped and the air seemed to tingle with a static charge.  The Asgardian didn’t do well with derision, and Ultron calling them a family was beyond mocking.

Steve’s stomach twisted at Ultron’s words.  _Tv?  Oh god-_   “The statement from Tony?” the captain asked with a telltale tremble in his voice, holding Thor’s worried gaze.  “For the media?  You released it already?”  He hadn’t expected it so soon.

 _Wasn’t Ultron supposed to have vetted it with the World Security Council?  Where will that push things?  How will the public react?_ Steve was suddenly overwhelmed - the sheer breadth of terrible potential had him gripping Bucky’s hand for stability.

“Hm, you’re an _intuitive_ man, Captain Rogers.  You’ll see,” Ultron teased, his tone dark and triumphant as if he’d scented Steve’s fear, “At dinner.”

“We’ll be there,” Steve said, swallowing a queasy feeling.  He couldn’t exactly say no, could he?  That “eating from his hand” business?  That wasn’t just him toying with Tony.  Ultron had meant that for _all of them_ , and Steven felt it with a sinking horror.  He was pulling the strings.  Moving the scenery.  Making them dance.

* * *

 

Tony was back in his lab again when he finally returned to his senses.  For a while, he was mired in a mental fog of submission, and the empty lab did little to bring him back.  It was pain that did it.  Sitting down ached _in his bones,_ shot bolts of agony through his hips and pelvis and back.  He cried out hoarsely, rocking forward reflexively and leaning his weight onto quaking arms.  Worse than the pain, though, was the awareness of what he’d done.  It was _sobering_ and _shameful_.

As tough as he played, Tony had practically _shut off_ under Ultron’s coercion and violence.  The engineer had collapsed in on himself as if he were boneless – like a mushy deep-sea creature dredged up from the fathoms.  He’d been nothing but dumb, quivering guts and raw nerves as Ultron _took him apart_.

And in the most perverse way possible… he’d _enjoyed_ it, even as he’d _hated_ it.  Tony felt pathetic that he let himself be manipulated… but by a machine that he’d created?  And for him to _get off_ on Ultron’s puppeteering when the _entire world was at stake?_ This was a wholly mortifying new low.  

A lifetime ago, he distinctly remembered Pepper screaming _‘Your work has always run your life!’_   Now, it was so horrifically literal, it turned Tony’s stomach.

No matter what Ultron said about protecting humanity, Tony had no _true_ notion of the AI’s endgame.  After all, Ultron had twisted them all under his thumb.  Who knew what else he’d do to reach his goals, how he would use Tony’s arsenal, or where his “man-machine hybrid” would take them?  Tony had to stop navel-gazing and start moving forward, to find some way to put a stop to everything, because this was _dangerous_.  He didn’t have a game plan yet, but he’d get there, and hopefully before shit got much worse.

“That doesn’t look like working,” Ultron’s chiding voice cut in over the speakers, making Tony shoot upright from where he leaned into the lab desk.

The action made him yelp in pain again – and he cleared his throat, embarrassed.  “I can’t use my tech, and there’s nothing else here...”  Tony probed sheepishly, giving the lab a confused glance.  Now that he didn’t have to look the machine in the eye, resentment had replaced his fear.  “So am I back to pencil and paper drafting like a _goddamn heathen_?  Or are pencils _too dangerous_ for me, since I apparently can’t use silverware?”  He finished with an annoyed huff.

A cascade of delighted laughter crawled over his skin.  “Ah, there’s your spine!  I thought for a bit there that you’d misplaced it.”  Tony’s guts twisted, because Ultron sounded _entertained_ , as if this was a fun game.  “And to clarify, the collar keeps you from using _outside tech._ The lab stations are running my OS.  You can use them since-“

“-Yeah, yeah, you’re watching the baby monitor.  I parsed that out,” Tony finished, turning his attention to the nearest display.  Regardless, Tony felt a small wave of relief that he wasn’t completely cut off from technology, even if the machine was scrutinizing his every move.  Ultron would have safeguards upon safeguards.

The android chuckled again, “Well, aren’t you the smart one?  Also, your lab is sandboxed.  Trying to tinker with my code won’t work.”

Tony shook his head, trying to ignore the condescension in the machine’s words.   He waved a hand through the hologram display to wake up the glowing red console.  “I wouldn’t expect any less,” Tony shrugged, but was quietly disappointed that Ultron was so goddamn paranoid. 

_Where does he get that from, I wonder?_

“Anyway, working now, so you can quit hovering,” he spat, shifting the weight of the collar about uncomfortably on his neck. 

“Get used to it,” Ultron said before he faded out.

With a few gestures, Tony queried a medical database, drawing up literature on the human nervous system and tactile perception.  As much as he wanted to worm his way to escape _right now_ , he’d have to actually work on what Ultron wanted for the moment.  He’d have to chip away at his freedom slowly and stealthily; tunnel out of his prison by inches.  Carefully hide his trail.  _I am a bit short on Rita Hayworth posters, though._   _And hopefully, I won’t have to crawl through literal shit.  Oh wait, too late for that,_ he huffed a bitter laugh.

Tony grabbed a nerve diagram in one hand and a map of the human brain in the other, and chucked them out above the far consoles so they were projected, huge, into the middle of the room.  And then the engineer got back to basics, reviewing fundamentals of biology and neurology he hadn’t studied since anatomy class in high school.  Immediately, the flow of work absorbed him.  Having something concrete, a mechanical task to attack, always comforted him.  It allowed him to step away from the turmoil churning inside him - and the terror about things to come - which was why he’d been so _insanely_ productive in the year after Pepper.

Entranced by the challenge, hours flew past him completely unmarked.  Though not a biologist by any stretch of the imagination, the engineer buried himself in physiology and biochemistry to better understand what he needed to replicate.  He toyed eagerly with the diagram of the nervous system, poking and prodding and picking it apart.

He pored over medical journal articles and texts, his curiosity piqued by the mechanisms of touch: how the different corpuscles worked together to sense light touch, deep pressure, skin stretch, vibration, position.  How the myelinated structure of nerve fibers created a saltatory action potential that sped the nerve impulse.  The way the brain’s ventral posterior nucleus functioned as a sensory signal sorting relay.  How the somatosensory cortex combined a map of the body and a sophisticated decoding algorithm to pinpoint, process, and react to the input of touch. 

The chemistry of the thing was wholly irrelevant to Tony’s finished product, since Ultron’s body was electrical; digital rather than analog.  Sensation was – at its core – an electrical signal, so emulating it seemed achievable.  Tony took the nervous system diagram and systematically tore away the ‘fluff’, leaving the basest elements for him to toy with, to brainstorm.  It was just a matter of distilling the structures into synthetic parts. 

The human body – aside from being wet and squishy – was nothing if not an insanely complex machine.  And the more Tony studied, the clearer the components became:  input hardware for skin, wiring for the nerves, programming for the somatosensory cortex.  He noted that, scrawling furiously on the touch table with a stylus.  He drew an extremely rough sketch.

_Okay, a three-part schematic, that’s progress._

With the right design, Ultron could get the mechanical input of touch, send a “nerve impulse” through artificial fibers, and decode it with somatosensory coding of Tony’s design.  The next question was, what materials to use?  Replicating skin was going to be tricky; not only did it track pressure, vibration, and distortion, it did so with mind-boggling sensitivity. 

A hard metal exterior like Ultron had now was fundamentally wrong for that kind of sensation. 

_Some kind of pliant polymer skin – piezoresistant, maybe, so under current, it can turn surface distortion and pressure into digital feedback?_

Tony scrubbed a hand over his chin, feeling a bloom of confidence in the idea.  The tech existed, though it hadn’t been applied to something on this scale yet.  Not only would a soft exterior work like human skin, it would also make Ultron less sharp and pointy.  Which would definitely benefit Tony.  He wasn’t a fan of the way the android cut and scraped him constantly.  Tony scribbled it in the diagram with a big question mark, still unclear on the implementation, and dug up all the known literature on piezoresistant polymers, which he set aside for later.

* * *

 

Six hours later, the team was huddled en masse around the dining room table, talking in hushed, worried tones over untouched plates of food.  They were all _terribly_ awake, though few of them had slept well.  Even after news had gotten around that Tony was whole, the sheer chaos meant nobody knew _what_ was happening.  Particularly with the looming silence from SHIELD, the World Security Council, and the military…  The question on everyone’s lips was, “Have _you_ heard from Fury?  Have you heard _anything_?”

The resounding answer was _no._   None of them could reach out – their communication had been cut off, and that aside, they’d been too busy licking their wounds.

Everyone fell silent when Ultron strolled through, smiling unpleasantly.  “I’ll be right back.  Don’t stand on ceremony, eat.” he waved dismissively.  The machine was heading for Tony’s lab.

* * *

 

Tony was standing in the middle of the projection, evaluating potential nerve fiber materials.  As he considered the merits of copper cable and fiber optics, he nervously twirled and twisted holographic nerve structures in his hands.  But the sudden interruption of the doors opening at his back made him jump and yelp.

“Jesus, could you _warn_ a guy?”  Tony’s heart was in his throat at the thought of Ultron barreling in at him.  He didn’t turn around to look - he couldn’t.  Instead, he froze like a deer.  PTSD was such a bitch.  _Oh god, am I in trouble again?_

“Look,” Tony babbled sheepishly, whirling the rough draft around him with a sweeping wave.  It spun loosely, casting the room in a flickering red glow. “No monkey business, see?  I’m researching.  Drafting.   _Behaving._ ”  His heart hammered in his throat in the silence.  His mouth was sour with fear.

Ultron silently strode up next to him, folding his arms in the small of his back and letting his eyes roam.  The schematics that were unfolding around Tony blossomed with an organic scrawl of equations.  Little notes on materials, components.  Loose illustrations, painted in light.  With a hum of approval, the machine looked down at the human, who was forcefully, tellingly still, his eyes downcast, body terror-tense.  “Six hours, Stark,” he mused, his voice uncharacteristically pleasant, “And it looks like you are _well on your way_ to a viable build.  I _knew_ you could do it.”

Tony snapped his eyes up, giving the android a dubious look.  Ultron seemed _thrilled_.  He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or worried.  “Uh, thanks?” He tried, “I still have details to work out but-“

The machine chuckled with surprise as he reached out to prod at the model, interrupting, “You’re giving me skin?  Stark, you’re giving me **_skin_**?!”  And for a moment, Ultron sounded frighteningly childlike.  Curious.  Excited, even.

The engineer fell quiet, his mind struggling to integrate this side of Ultron with what he’d seen a few hours ago.  “Hard metal won’t give you tactile feedback.  So yes.”

A big metal paw scooped his chin up so he was looking up into gleaming red optics.  “Smartass,” the machine rumbled, but there was an amiable note in it; a little smirk curling the corner of his mouth.  “You’ve done _very well,_ and I am _very pleased_.  We’ll pick up on this after dinner.  You’ve _definitely_ earned it.  Come along.”

_Dinner.  Oh god he’s going to-_

But before Tony’s thoughts could spiral further, he was yanked a little by the collar.  Not painfully so, but enough to make him lurch.  Ultron tugged him forwards and gave him a little push so Tony was walking ahead of the android.  He began to shake.  Tony had a bad feeling about this.

* * *

 

There were altogether too many worried eyes on him when Tony limped into the dining room.  He met them, horrified and self-conscious, for only a second before it was too much and he studied the floor, trembling harder.  The air was so thick with tension you could have cut it with a knife. 

 _Why can’t you **fucking** hold it together in front of them? _  He cursed himself.  _What have they seen?  What do they know? What do they think of you?_ His traitorous mind whirled.  “Hi guys,” he bit out, his body rigid and vibrating with nerves.  But that was when noticed there was one vacant chair at the end of the table… and a cushion next to it on the floor.  The team was _studiously_ not looking at it.

“Hi Tony,” Pepper broke the silence, the soft, apologetic sorrow in her voice digging into him.  He sagged a little, still not looking up.

“-Why is everyone so glum?” Ultron cut in with inappropriate cheer.  Tony wasn’t looking, but he could practically _hear_ the sneer on the robot’s face.  “We’re all together!  We should be celebrating our new alliance!”  He hooked a finger in the collar and dragged Tony over to the little cushion.  The human went along, sinking as Ultron lowered him to a kneel on the thing.  The shaking seemed utterly beyond his control at this point, as if Tony was trapped in a personal earthquake.

 _…Hell.  I’m in hell,_ he thought, sinking horribly.  Everything beyond the metal hand on his shoulder fuzzed out.  There was an indignant chatter going on above his head then, he realized with sickening shame.  He needed…

He needed to be present, he couldn’t leave his friends to deal with this mess alone.  He couldn’t sit there, sagging like a marionette with the strings cut.  Tony drew in a huge gulp of air and tried to focus.  This was bigger than him and his embarrassment.

“Why are you doing this?” Rhodey was braying at Ultron, his voice straining with repressed rage.  The sound of his concern warmed Tony, soothing something painful in his chest.  “We get that you’re in control here.  But why can’t he sit up here with us, like a _person!?_ ”

“He’s not a _dog_ ,” Sam added, sounding brittle, like he was on the verge of an explosion. “Or a- a-“

“-A _what_ , Wilson?”  Ultron said, sharp and knowing, deliberately mocking, ”Oh, is this striking some kind of nerve?”

There was a scuffle of movement, sharply aborted, and the table jumped as people – probably Rhodes and Wilson – rocketed to their feet.  The hand on his shoulder went to Tony’s neck and squeezed with a force that made Tony gag audibly over the sound of the struggle.

“Sam, James, don’t!”  Steve barked.  The engineer dared a glance up through the glass table.  Steve had a hand on Sam, and Thor was practically bear-hugging Rhodey to keep him from attacking.

“He is needling at the places he knows it hurts the most,” Thor rumbled, low and soothing.

They were going to implode if Tony didn’t do something.  “Guys, stop, I’m okay,” Tony grated out hoarsely, feeling as far from okay as possible.  _Chin up.  For them,_ he told himself.  “We’re going to have to roll with this.  Chill.”

Ultron let him loose, “I would listen to him.  He volunteered for this, remember?  Now, can we get on to business?”

“If you’ll cut the theatrics,” Bruce griped, “Steve says you released a video to the public?  We need to know what’s going on and what our next steps are.”

“That’s what I was getting to,” Ultron replied blandly.  “Watch.”

A newscast projected across the table above Tony and the walls of the dining room: an anchorwoman narrated grimly about the circumstances after the Avengers’ fight in Sokovia.  They had finally gotten word about the AI’s whereabouts and the developing situation.  A headline filled the screen beside her: ‘Post-Sokovia: Stark in Chains’.  She warned that the video footage they had received could be distressing to some viewers. 

_And then there was Tony himself, his face red and wet with the aftermath of tears.  He knelt on the floor, his eyes hollowed out.  “Say hello to the people, Tony,” Ultron’s voice echoed off-frame.  A metal hand came into view and braced the human’s chin as he muttered a shaky hello._

_“Now tell them why you’re here,” he urged._

_The human spoke slowly, and robotically.  “I designed the Ultron program to protect you from threats.  What I did not anticipate was that he would want to protect you from me.  My weapons and failures have always endangered you.  The fight in Sokovia and everything that resulted was my fault.  My decisions brought us to it.  I created something bigger than me.  I nearly destroyed Sokovia in an attempt to neutralize Ultron, and people died because of it.”_

_“And what are we doing to fix that?”  The machine prompted, his tone exultant at the way he had mangled the truth to pin his crimes on Tony._

_Tony droned on, beginning to leak more tears.  “I’ve willingly surrendered myself and all of my weapons so that Ultron can carry out his mission of protecting humanity.  Under his guidance, the Avengers, the Stark Foundation, and I will be cleaning up my damage in Sokovia.  In an agreement with the United Nations under the newly drafted Sokovia Accords, Ultron will be designated oversight of the Avengers team so that no Enhanced can abuse their power and put civilian lives in danger.”_

The team reeled back at the news, a few of them bleating “Sokovia Accords?” in unified confusion.  Ultron shushed them.

_“What does that mean for you, Tony?” Ultron purred, petting his hair._

_“Disarmament and a life sentence of hard labor.  Ultron will maintain total custody of me as a dangerous war criminal, also per the Accords.”_

_Then the hand in Tony’s hair wrenched tight, tilting his head back so the human winced and the collar flashed in the light.  “Tell them about the collar on your neck.”_

_“It prevents me from using any tech that I could potentially weaponize-“_

_His face was tugged to the side then, pressed against a metal thigh, as Ultron praised and petted him, “Good boy…”_  

The footage abruptly cut off there, returning to the news anchor’s pinched, uncomfortable face.  “Although we have not had an official statement by the United Nations verifying this footage, we have received a complete copy of the Sokovia Accords which back up the claims of this sentence, including the… ah… collar.  These documents have been passed and signed unanimously by the UN, and also by all members of the Avengers team-“

The dining room erupted in enraged, confused shouts.

“-So it seems that for now, Stark is in some type of… custody, though details are hazy.  The whereabouts of the Iron Man weapons-“

Ultron shut off the broadcast then, and simply waited for the snarling to die down.  Tony’s heart was jackhammering, his ears were ringing, and he thought he might be sick on the spot.  So _that_ was how Ultron was playing it.  He’d pinned it ALL on Tony.  The world had wanted Tony’s blood, and the machine had given it to them.  Tony’s guilt played perfectly into Ultron’s narrative.  The engineer felt himself wilting where he sat, going numb with humiliation.  He turned his gaze to the floor.  The entire world knew now.

“You forged our signatures on a document we Never.  Even.  Saw.”  Steve murmured in a flat rage.  “A document that condemns Tony.”

“You’re surprised?” Ultron laughed outright.  “Out of all of this, _that_ surprises you, Old Timer?”

“Tony keeps them on file for above-board, official use,” Pepper groaned, putting her head in her hands and shaking it.

Exasperated, Clint cut in then, “That aside, you’re telling us the United Nations endorsed this shit??”

Ultron smiled, slow and awful.  “I hold all the chips, bird brain.  I wrote it.  They signed it and claimed it because, one – it’s a tidy, clean story and people like having someone to blame.  Two – they’re afraid of what I can do.  And three – they don’t want everyone to know just how much I own.  This gives them the illusion of control.  And illusion is a powerful thing.  Now, why don’t you all take some time to relax and eat, since that’s out of the way?  It’s been a difficult few days, and for your cooperation, you all deserve it.”

With a loud scrape of wood on tile, Pepper stood up and leaned in, banging her hands on the surface with enough force to rattle it.  Her eyes looked like coals.  “Where is Fury?  Where is SHIELD?  Where is the World Security Council and the UN and everyone else?  Why aren’t we hearing from them?  Talking it out!?”

“Miss Potts,” Ultron said calmly, over a clamor of whirring, “This isn’t a democracy.”  Sentries were looming in the doorways around them.  In a warning tone, Ultron prime continued, “If you blow up, so do I.  And I’ll take a lot more people with me than the ones in this room.”

Everything stilled as Pepper cooled down, sighing heavily and sitting back down.

“Now, where was I?  Dinner!” The android was back to being jovial again, as if nothing at all had happened.  He picked up the plate that had been waiting at his place setting and smiled down at Tony.  The team shared lost looks, pushing their food around listlessly.  They were obviously trying not to look at Tony, who was still parked awkwardly on the floor like a dog.

Tony could feel their eyes on him in the periphery rather than see it.  The shaking had started again.  “Don’t make me,” he plead, staring at the floor near Ultron’s feet.  “Please don’t make me.  I can’t.”

“Aren’t you hungry?  You worked so _hard_ for me today,” the AI purred with a bit too much glee.

Tony was falling again, a sickening void opening up beneath him just when he thought he couldn’t go any lower.  A painful silence stretched on and Tony slumped forward, hiding his face against the android’s leg.  “Please don’t,” he hissed.  He was _begging_ in front of his team.

There was the sound of another chair scraping the floor, and a voice that had been silent all evening spoke up, soft but firm.  “Ultron, will you let me do it?  Will you let me take care of him?”

It was Bucky.  Out of all of them.

The android laughed, intrigued.  “Now _that’s_ interesting,” he drawled.  “Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, I know it's been a stupidly long time since I've updated. Aside from struggling with rather crippling writer's block, things in my life have been crazy with caring for aging grandparents, lung issues, an overload at work, a death of a loved one, and also starting medical transitioning! The good news is I have a pretty solid outline for the rest of the story and I can soon move on to writing the really *fun* parts of the story that I've been looking forward to writing and surprising you with. I really struggled to hammer out the latter part of this chapter, but now that it's out of the way (even though it's not perfect), I think I can finally move the narrative forward in the way I want.
> 
> If you couldn't tell by that middle section, I'm a bit of a biology nerd.
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoy! I'm going to try and respond to all of the comments here that I've missed in my time off, because I love all of you who take the time to comment on this <3 <3 thanks again for all the love you've thrown my way.


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